By William Blake (b. 1991)
Located in Chicago, IL
William Blake’s oil painting asks us to perceive the powerful layers of history that shape both art and memory. In Blake’s painting is a man, but what Blake painted is an idea. Hugh Goffinet stares out from the canvas in the dress of a soldier, without being one. He is a reenactor of an African American volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. His inspiration is the Lincolns—the battalion’s volunteers—but they are pictured only symbolically, in his dress. Their inspiration was Lincoln, who many decades earlier helped give meaning to the American Civil War, but who is invisible in the painting except by implication—the pose of Hugh Goffinet—which carefully emulates Lincoln’s pose in the celebrated presidential portrait by George Healy. Entirely hidden, at the deepest layer of history, is the true source of inspiration: the human desire for equality and freedom. To understand, honor, and preserve it requires remembrance, in this case with history animating reenactors who animate art that animates memory.
Artist, William Blake channels the spirit of Winslow Homer's war imagery, bringing it into the contemporary world, asking us to reflect upon the decisions forced to be made in wartime, some of which will never leave us. As for the paintings, William uses materials and methods of the Civil War era. The linen on which he paints was in use at that time as well as the tubed oil paints. He is one of the few artists who tacks his canvas to the stretchers using similar tacks that would have been used by Winslow Homer. While he leaves the works unframed for this reason, the artwork could certainly be framed. This piece is unframed. Please contact the gallery for framing options.
William Blake
Salud Johnny, 2023
oil on linen
76h x 36w in
193.04h x 91.44w cm
WIL049
Known for his highly charged depictions of Civil War reenactments, William Blake’s powerful paintings show the recursive bodies of reenactors as they gesture across time. Participating in over 40 reenactment events, Blake currently interprets as the artist-correspondent Winslow Homer at these battle reenactments. He immerses himself in the materiality of his own obsession by constructing period clothes, camping on battlefields, and documenting the reenactment similar to Homer’s documentation of the authentic war.
The figures in the paintings reverberate the past with respect and with a desire to educate, humble, and play. With each annual iteration of American Civil War reenactments, the reanimation of the past encourages a review of history and aids in its continuous revision.
For his second exhibition with Gallery Victor Armendariz, William Blake presents A Great Battlefield, a collection of new paintings depicting US Marines at the Gettysburg National Military Park. A Great Battlefield, takes its title from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which poetically looks to the battlefield as a site of rebirth. Following the tradition of nineteenth-century American history painting...
Category
2010s Contemporary Ruth Shively Figurative Paintings
