William Yu has a personal and deep spiritual relation to his visual material.
This passion shows in his freedom of form and color.
His paintings have an overwhelming sense of massiveness, and are like sculpture in motion.
It is the cubist style, flattened spaces, simplified shapes, and fragmented composition that serves to activate the figure. The brush and palette knife strokes are a spontaneous impulse rather than a careful lay down.
Beauty and decoration are still motivating factors in the works of many artists.
But this artist’s principle problem was to clarify what his true subject really is. ...
On one side of the composition are easily recognizable shapes and forms. A mother and child. A bountiful harvest. A stampede of horses. A koi pond. Birds in flight. A full catalog of subjects that the artist painted all his life.
Then opposite these, are ancient scribblings. Is it alibata? For exact identification as to what they are, only the artist knows . Nevertheless these are beautiful art forms in themselves, They look like a part of a complex mathematical equation. They look like Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs. They are the archaic Hebrew alphabet. And the name of The Almighty as he was known ages ago as Yahuwah prominently written.
All the world’s religions have produced great art, perhaps the greatest we know. They served to communicate specific teachings, and create emotional charge and spiritual uplift to those who follow.
This artist discovered a change of faith and used the act of creating art as a path to higher realms. Painting as a set of wordless symbols. Painted heavily, alive with vigor, passion and roughness of execution.
Painting is the medium by which his thoughts and feelings are expressed. And his faith comes from the process of painting itself. It is prayer crying for release and expression with paint.
Without background information, our grasp of the material is incomplete.
But like most artists, they do not intend for us to have a verbal handle to guide our thinking. What is it about? What is happening?
We are left alone to discover his truths, as well as our personal own.
