I LOVE YOU BILL: A William Douglas Retrospective

Please join us for our April Third Friday Open Studios and the opening of our new exhibition: "I LOVE YOU BILL: A William Douglas Retrospective."

About the show:

If you are familiar with the work of William Douglas, you have surely encountered his drawings of beautiful women incorporated with text exclaiming “I LOVE YOU BILL!” And with Douglas, there is, indeed, a lot to love. A soft-spoken man with thick glasses and a thick beard, Douglas is an intuitive intellectual. He has an empathetic spirit, a sweetness that is balanced with the bitter notes of experience.

Douglas’s practice has roots in traditional folk and craft techniques. He collects and fuses found materials into spiritual objects- animal remains, thrift-store tchotchkes, remnants pilfered from the garbage - all are worthwhile components. He’s also fascinated by pattern, building rhythms of shape and color.

All such vocabularies feed into a twisting journey of self-exploration. Vividly-recalled dreams and the highs of spiritual unity are mixed up with loss, addiction, anxiety, and death. The whole constellation is held together by a lovably cynical sense of humor. The most recent examples: thirty improvised kaleidoscopic “brains,” where Christian iconography, antidepressant pills, and childhood memories all stew together in the same brightly-colored skulls.

Douglas received his BFA at University of Tennessee, Knoxville and his MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago. After years of struggling with his mental health, Douglas started working with an art therapist, who referred him to Project Onward in 2014. Douglas suffered a critical stroke in 2018, and lost the use of his dominant hand. He has since re-taught himself to draw with his left hand.

In this retrospective of Douglas’s work, we feature works from a wide variety of series and periods of his career: before his stroke, during recovery, and more recent work. The constant through all these phases: the wild imagination and force of will alive within this gentle natured man.