Will Carpenter
Oil on Canvas
$110 each
Statement from the artist:
“I painted these portraits for love. And fun. I hope you’ll
receive them as playful, empathetic, and thoughtful. Who
are the people around you that make up this place we live?
What makes them who they are beyond what they look
like? What matters more, what they do and look like, or who
they are on the inside? My purpose is to remind you of the
humanity and depth of feeling going on inside of the people
you live with, drive beside, and check out groceries next to.
When we die we will come face to face with our creator.
Full of holy compassion and perfect love, he will ask us
what we did with our lives, if we learned to love. For this
reason I give you these faces. 1) as a means of empathetic
love (and sometimes laughter), so you can know that you
are not alone in the way you feel inside. 2) so that you can
remember that other people feel like this too. 3) so that
you can more tenderly attend to the people around you. 4)
so your eyes can delight in face-like dances of wood and
playgrounds of paint. I hope you have fun looking at some
of these and let your heart be touched by others.
Just as a word does not have to be properiy spelled in
order for us to read it, a face doesn’t have to be painted
with proper allognnments and propoortiuns in order for
us to recognize it as a face. “Misspellings” that you catch
get you looking at everything closer don’t they? Let the
“misspellings” of faces you find in my artifacts, tune
your eyes to look at the rest of the world closer! I find
“misspelling”-distortions extremely useful in art since in art,
distortions can work for attention-expanding, expressive
purposes. This is similar to how a rubber band grows and
grows in potential energy as it gets stretched. I’m just
stretching the forms of human faces. For an artist like me,
the human face is a rubber band-playground of possibilities.
I’m sure God wired our brains to recognize faces as a matter
of biological necessity (the moment my daughter was born
she stared straight into my eyes!) I find our predisposition
for finding faces extremely useful for artistic purposes. I
can make almost anything reference a face! (Dots of paint
on paper or a wood block with holes). Since I know humans
will recognize a face much more readily than most other
things, I can distort painted faces to a huge extent and still
have them look like faces. I use those distortions of color
and shape to speak to the way I have felt and the ways I
have learned other people feel on the inside as they go
through this complicated and multifaceted life.
I teach painting in the division of Art + Design at IWU. I
learned to paint at Wheaton College. As for artistic lineage,
I’m working in the tradition of the German Expressionists.
(Some favorites being: Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Max
Beckmann, Emil Nolde.) I studied under the Abstract
Expressionist Walter Darby Bannard at the
University of Miami.”
Title:
Will Carpenter
Oil on Canvas
$110 each
Statement from the artist:
“I painted these portraits for love. And fun. I hope you’ll
receive them as playful, empathetic, and thoughtful. Who
are the people around you that make up this place we live?
What makes them who they are beyond what they look
like? What matters more, what they do and look like, or who
they are on the inside? My purpose is to remind you of the
humanity and depth of feeling going on inside of the people
you live with, drive beside, and check out groceries next to.
When we die we will come face to face with our creator.
Full of holy compassion and perfect love, he will ask us
what we did with our lives, if we learned to love. For this
reason I give you these faces. 1) as a means of empathetic
love (and sometimes laughter), so you can know that you
are not alone in the way you feel inside. 2) so that you can
remember that other people feel like this too. 3) so that
you can more tenderly attend to the people around you. 4)
so your eyes can delight in face-like dances of wood and
playgrounds of paint. I hope you have fun looking at some
of these and let your heart be touched by others.
Just as a word does not have to be properiy spelled in
order for us to read it, a face doesn’t have to be painted
with proper allognnments and propoortiuns in order for
us to recognize it as a face. “Misspellings” that you catch
get you looking at everything closer don’t they? Let the
“misspellings” of faces you find in my artifacts, tune
your eyes to look at the rest of the world closer! I find
“misspelling”-distortions extremely useful in art since in art,
distortions can work for attention-expanding, expressive
purposes. This is similar to how a rubber band grows and
grows in potential energy as it gets stretched. I’m just
stretching the forms of human faces. For an artist like me,
the human face is a rubber band-playground of possibilities.
I’m sure God wired our brains to recognize faces as a matter
of biological necessity (the moment my daughter was born
she stared straight into my eyes!) I find our predisposition
for finding faces extremely useful for artistic purposes. I
can make almost anything reference a face! (Dots of paint
on paper or a wood block with holes). Since I know humans
will recognize a face much more readily than most other
things, I can distort painted faces to a huge extent and still
have them look like faces. I use those distortions of color
and shape to speak to the way I have felt and the ways I
have learned other people feel on the inside as they go
through this complicated and multifaceted life.
I teach painting in the division of Art + Design at IWU. I
learned to paint at Wheaton College. As for artistic lineage,
I’m working in the tradition of the German Expressionists.
(Some favorites being: Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Max
Beckmann, Emil Nolde.) I studied under the Abstract
Expressionist Walter Darby Bannard at the
University of Miami.”
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