William Painting

The painting is from a series of Belgian fishermen that I painted over a whole year, it was the intensity of the faces that immediately touched me deeply. Marked by years at sea and alcohol, faces that tell stories of storms and gout. They reminded me of my friends from Pütt in the Ruhr area, where I grew up. Honest hard workers, as we say. There, work is not just work, but a way of life. They live underground or on the high seas, where your life is in God's hands, as they say, the myth of the fisherman is one of the types of professions and not only since Jesus of Nazareth, the untamed man, at the mercy of the laws of nature, the possibility and Need to connect with your own instincts and self-healing powers after two years of project study at the Academy of Fine Arts. In Kolbermoor I felt mature enough to paint the emotions and the stories that these faces tell. And yet it took some time to get this project started. It was all very emotional for me, as were the many years of learning and the fact that I had to assert myself on the art market as an artist without an academic degree. Ultimately, the realization that all of this has more to do with me than I wanted to admit to myself - these long-out-of-fashion, unpolished, unyielding, free characters that pulled me into their bond. And so I spent weeks, months and finally more than a year with Yves, Charles Julian, Ramond and the others. The large formats are painted exclusively with acrylic paint. Acrylic gives you the ability to continue painting quickly once you have a good flow. And yet some of the portraits had to wait a long time before they could be finished. I just had to wait until I could finally finish it. The color blue, that of the sea, can be found in every possible variation in each of the images. As a contrast, colors that are very different from reality, such as pink, pink, neon, orange and purple, are a way for me to convey tension and therefore more emotionality.