The work of Bill Bewick explores the relevance of handmade art within today's digital world. His interest is focused upon the continual development and re-conceptualization of hand drawn and painted images, often but not exclusively of landscape and figurative genres. Like other modern artists, he is a student of art history and the intent and methods of important artists from both the historical and contemporary era strongly influence his work.
Bill's figurative work evokes the image of humanity in the mythical religious and general historical context both good and evil. He is also fascinated with depicting the existential nature of the humanity when material possessions and historical and cultural trappings have been removed and only the raw individual remains. His portraits and figures consist mostly of stark "mug shots" often of himself, representing individual experience, love, angst, life and death.
He views the landscape as eliciting emotion for the modern viewer from more than just an ironic perspective. The natural environment has been greatly mediated by the advance of humankind and our accompanying technology and quest for increased food production and sources of energy. Throughout the world, this process has accelerated since the industrial revolution to the point where virtually all of the land we see around us can be directly or indirectly defined as either created landscape or protected space.
The landscape paintings deal with the unrefined nature of the land within this premise of human control and always hints at human influence just peeping over that hedge or around that rock. The raw land can have a disquieting aspect evoking, even in our modern technically buttoned down world, a sense of present but undefined peril. In any image of the mountains, forests or open lands we can easily access haunting memories of our origins. The historic events or mythical tales both glorious and horrific have their roots in this earth; its land forms and vegetation bearing witness to and providing the setting and sustenance for all that we have coveted.