WILLIAM BOLTON

William Bolton creates charcoal, and mostly black + white oil paintings that address issues pertaining to the human condition, the passage of time, death, war, and the struggle to find happiness in the face of uncertainty. After moving from the south to New York, Bolton came to question religion, and the God who he grew up believing had a specific plan for each of us.

The images of machines in Bolton’s work can be viewed as stand-ins for the Divine. But Bolton does not present the Divine as the loving God of his youth, but instead as cold, impersonal, and opposite of human. Bolton has let go of the more traditional and religious concept of the divine that he originally held for a more open-ended view of the divine: “I no longer consider the divine to be like the God of the bible, but associate the divine more now with the concept of the infinite, or the unknowable. Understanding the infinite, I believe is the greatest mystery and for me is the most awe-inspiring and sublime subject to contemplate. But I also feel that understanding this mystery is an impossible task intellectually, and think that it requires pathways in the brain that humans do not possess or a entirely different concept of what is around us.” —WB