Geoform •••••• geometric form & structure in contemporary abstract art

An Interview with Artist William Conger
January 2008

William Conger began exhibiting professionally in 1958 at the Southwest and New Mexico Biennials in Santa Fe while he was still an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico and found a mentor in Raymond Jonson, the influential abstract painter and founder of the Transcendental Painting Group. Conger's gallery exhibitions began in 1960 when he showed in a group exhibition at the Great Jones Gallery in NYC curated by Elaine de Kooning. He completed his education at the University of Chicago where he received an MFA in 1966. His long teaching career was capped at Northwestern University where he is now Professor Emeritus of Art Theory and Practice. Conger has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Chicago and nationally. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KA; The Jonson Museum, Albuquerque, NM; The Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL; The Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL; and in many university museums, and corporate and private collections nationally and in Europe. Conger has completed public art commissions for the City of Chicago and for Chicago's McCormick Exposition Center. His career papers and records are archived in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art. A forty-year retrospective of his painting will be presented at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2009. Conger lives and works in Chicago where he is represented by Roy Boyd Gallery.

Julie Karabenick: Your paintings present imaginary realms that are new to us, yet allusive.

William Conger: My paintings are "as if" places and stories acted out in imagination. They evoke associative responses to abstract form. The paintings are surrogates or metaphors of selfness in the most complete way I can devise in any single work. They are layered metaphors of my self-imagining.

Florida, oil on canvas, 152 x 355 cm (60 x 132 in), 2003

When I begin a painting, it's typical for me to be motivated by formal issues more than expressive ones. Once a painting gets underway, however, I begin to be preoccupied by allusions and recollections brought to mind by the shapes and how I paint them. The painting process is slow enough to invite contemplative free-associating as I work.

JK: Many passages in your paintings suggest a deep space.

WC: I never was much interested in completely flat abstraction. Everything I paint is somehow illusionist. Years ago, I made up a rule: The logic of pictorial space is not the logic of real space. In pictorial space, two things can be in the same place at the same time, whereas in real space they cannot. I suppose this is another way of defining cubist space. My abstraction has always been intuitive. I never abstracted from nature or used a grid or any geometric system.

Ravenswood, oil on canvas, 178 x 188 cm (70 x 74 in), 2006

I don't really calculate my compositions, but simply follow my inclinations and feelings. Perhaps it's like conducting improvisational music—I just feel where the emphasis should be, what color should rise, what line descend. The painting is a performance, a metaphor of myself reaching and leaning, stretching and pulling. Maybe my way of composing is a residue of earlier influences of Abstract Expressionist action painting. Only now, the action is fully internalized and passed through a formal filter, as it were. I think intuitively and playfully with shapes and colors just as a mathematician might amuse herself with numbers and equations.

JK: You offer the viewer considerable spatial ambiguity.

WC: I'm interested in the transgressive results of contradictory modes of treating pictorial space. That's a cubist inheritance. I want to keep ambiguity without having to rely on flatness. All of my work bridges the polarities of flatness and depth, object and void, ambiguity and literalness. In the end, I want a composition that strongly suggests place or figure, but without representation or depiction. It's all formal and pictorial; that is, it's impossible and nothing—except in painting.

Intersections Chicago I, oil on canvas, 213 x 335 cm (84 x 132 in), 2002

I remember saying that my paintings seem to exist just behind the surface, not on it. That's why I came to avoid textures and obvious brush marks. My paintings have an abstract, illogical atmosphere and light, as if created by the shapes, not for them. I combine flat planes defining the picture surface with those suggesting a stronger illusion of space.

I like the clarity of a severe formal presentation, seemingly requiring a flat plane but immersed in a strange, immeasurable space. What could be more contradictory than hard edges in a quasi-atmospheric space with shifting internal light?

Recruit, oil on wood, 91 x 91 cm (36 x 36 in), 2005

JK: We often sense a horizon line in your work that encourages us to make real-world sense of the painting's space.

WC: The horizon line is an affirmation of the material world—and it's a lie. It's a zone of ambiguity. Like a mirage, the horizon always slips away from you. You never know where it really is or where the sky actually becomes land or water.

Sheridan, oil on canvas, 152 x 127 cm (60 x 50 in), 2006

JK: Glimpses of a potential horizon line provoke even greater ambiguity in your paintings—ambiguity about the fundamental nature of the space before us.

WC: I want to explore an interesting paradox: how easily we perceive the illusion of pictorial space while retaining the awareness of the flat surface, the paint and the work itself as an object. Our quick willingness to make believe, to immediately perceive an art object or image as a metaphor is strange, a habituated reflex. It's not something we do very much in our day-to-day experience except perhaps unconsciously.

I allude to this paradox by suggesting painted metaphors and denying them in the same composition. I suppose this is the opposite of minimal and formalist art theory, which is aimed purely at objecthood without metaphor. But it's central to abstraction, particularly to earlier abstract painting, although abandoned after WWI. It's the unfinished adventure of modernist painting.

Vigil, oil on wood, 91 x 91 cm (36 x 36 in), 2005

JK: The paradox—painting as illusion and flat surface—is reinforced by how you cut off many shapes at the canvas edge.

WC: The suggestion of continued pictorial space beyond the framing edge is forcefully contradicted by the literal end of the canvas. I want to echo that contradiction within the composition even as I indulge illusionist and allusionist options. If you feel the urge to complete a shape beyond the painting's edge, then you are adding imaginative content. It's a reminder of the make-believe nature of perception and art.

Herald, oil on linen, 213 x 61 cm (84 x 24 in), 2005

JK: Tension and ambiguity are heightened by the complex ways your shapes interact with one another.

WC: I've always preferred to connect shapes, to string them together along linear paths and to intersect the canvas edge. These linear connections create a web of ambiguous positive or negative space, figure or ground. This enables me to modulate the shapes, add atmosphere, toy with illogical light and dark, allude to things and places without locking any identity explicitly. Every shape and color is both something and nothing, substance and void.

Pioneer, oil on canvas, 152 x 244 cm (60 x 96 in), 2003-04

JK: Many small dramas play out across the canvas, precluding a primary focal point and foiling a simple resolution of the space.

WC: I want the viewer to feel embodied as a painting, as if one is the painting. In that sense the painting is like a moving, stretching self, a body, a playful consciousness. First you are here, then there; you are this, then that; you are reaching, floating, bumping. Thus you create the space you're looking at by vicariously acting within it.

Scout, oil on wood, 91 x 91 cm (36 x 36 in), 2005

JK: Your shapes coexist—sometimes peacefully, but more often in a state of tension or even discord.

WC: In 1965, one of my professors at the University of Chicago, the great modernist scholar, Joshua Taylor, explained Jacques Louis David's compositions as "thrust and counter-thrust." Every line or shape was countered by an equally forceful opposing line or shape. That, he explained, stabilized the compositions, making them heroic, contemplative, iconic, yet full of action. Thrust and counter-thrust are aggressive in my mind, as if each movement intends to vanquish its target, but none succeeds. The result is action in momentarily stable balance.

Loyalist, oil on canvas, 152 x 127 cm (60 x 50 in), 2006

The static nature of painting is contrary to the continual flow of events and perception. The "frozen moment" is the hallmark of painting, and the painter has the task of imagining the flow of time before and after the static moment depicted. My aim is to suggest that the frozen moment I compose is unique—idealized, yet fleeting. I want the viewer's gaze to hold the moment, as if looking alone can rescue it from a disorderly, chaotic past and future.

New Spain, oil on canvas, 183 x 127 cm (72 x 50 in), 2004

WC: I almost always begin a painting with unplanned formal rhythms and structural lines. It's a nameless arrangement of shape and color. Yet as the painting develops, I play along with its evocations or allusions. In the end, I want my paintings to pull viewers into make-believe space.

JK: The firm edges or outlines around your shapes contrast with the handling of the areas inside—further contributing to the work's ambiguity.

WC: The hard edge in my painting is my choice, but often a reluctant one. I'm interested in the sfumato of atmospheric painting—the blurred edges that open the window and flood the painting with deep colored space. The interiors of my shapes are often on the edge of depicting airy open space. This is contradicted by the edges, however, which remain in the crisp realm of the mind, not of nature. Paradoxical duality is crucial to my painting. Often shapes suggest either empty space or solid matter, but sometimes not. Anything goes in pictorial space.

Navigator, oil on wood, 91 x 91 cm (36 x 36 in), 2006

The title, Navigator, is an allusion to the artist as navigator of the painting, and to the composition that navigates pictorial space. The navigator metaphor emphasizes the responsibility of the artist in creating a journey, and the responsibility of art to embody feeling and meaning.

JK: You're often regarded as a colorist.

WC: Color is a difficult issue for me. I always begin with lines, thus the rhythm of the painting is linear. But once underway my paintings are all about color and the very subtle color relationships that transcend basic color theory. I'm always trying to vex ordinary color harmony and rely purely on instinct. My paintings are a process of linear and color discovery.

JK: Turning to some background information, you were born in 1937 in the small town of Dixon, 100 miles west of Chicago.

WC: My father had an auto supply and appliance retail business, and our family lived in an apartment over the store. This was very modest living as my father's business, always tough going, was soon bankrupted by Depression era woes. From 1939 to 1943, we moved around, finally settling in Evanston, Illinois where my father began a successful career in merchandising and publishing.

JK: You did a lot of drawing as a child.

WC: In Evanston, I recall drawing stylized tulips and working very hard to copy the wave design decorating the crib of my infant sister, Clara. I developed step-by-step diagrams of things like flowers or even people. I loved connect-the-dots puzzle drawings, and Donald Duck soon became a favorite image to copy. How I struggled with his foreshortened bill!

Soon I tried to draw by direct looking. By age six, I had apparently decided to be an artist because that’s what I blurted out in school one day upon being asked what I wanted to grow up to be. I figured I'd better live up to my boast.

My mother was an amateur painter. She often took me to the Chicago Art Institute, and I became so familiar with the museum that I memorized every gallery. I bought postcard reproductions of the masters and would try to copy them with poster paints.

JK: You enrolled in the demanding Chicago Loyola Academy prep school.

WC: The curriculum was rigorous and academic, taught by Jesuits. There was no attention to art. It didn’t take long to expose me as having no study skills and no interest in Latin and algebra. I drew pictures of cars instead, and by the end of that year I was excluded from the school. Concluding I wasn't very smart, my parents enrolled me in a trade school where I excelled in architectural drawing and shop, but I quit school at 16 after a suspension for fighting. My parents sent me to live with my grandmother in Wisconsin. She was famed as her town's most demanding no-nonsense school teacher. The following year, I attended a Catholic high school where I had ample opportunity to draw and paint, and I achieved some distinction as the school artist.

JK: You were admitted to the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1956.

WC: I loved the intensity of the school but didn't like living at home. An associate of my father was a good amateur artist. He convinced me to attend The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and study with his friend, Raymond Jonson, the founder of the Transcendental Painting Group that was devoted to geometric abstraction.

JK: So you left the city for a strikingly different environment.

WC: The vastness of the Southwest landscape made a lasting impression on me. Nature seemed to heave and move on a huge scale. Nothing was hidden. Wherever you looked, you saw new and ancient nature side by side. A meditative or awed response seemed to be the only way to comprehend the bigness, the variety, the daunting presence of the landscape. It encouraged a broad way of painting; it mocked little gestures, small shapes, weak colors. New Mexico was not a place for purely intellectualized art. Instead, it inspired a romantic, transcendent abstraction imbued with fear. I think this is what we see in the best works by Jonson and the Transcendental Painting Group.

JK: And Jonson became your mentor.

WC: Jonson's sense of total commitment to his work impressed me. He left nothing to chance. He was very involved with the technical side of his art, in contrast to the highly informal procedures of the AbEx work everyone was doing then. His sincerity about the spiritual aspect of his work came from Kandinsky, whom I already regarded as the most important artist in Modernism. I felt a kinship with Jonson even though his approach was less fashionable at the time—more geometric, hard-edged, not purely intuitive action painting.

I was impressed by Jonson's illusionist form because it signified atmosphere and real world references. His painting was always a picture of something absent. That was a big idea to me. It was contrary to everything I was being taught—that a painting should be an object documenting its creation, not a representation of something else. Jonson acquired one of my first large paintings, below, for the museum. I think he paid me $25 for it, and of course I was very pleased.

Untitled, oil on canvas, 216 x 165 cm (85 x 65 in), 1958

In this work, I decided to use soft shapes because I wanted to overpaint with translucent colors to obtain a glowing surface. Much of the color was stained into the canvas over a thin ground.

My other paintings of this period had slashing lines and shapes in highly contrasting colors. Some paintings had scraps of stained canvas glued on. Looking back, I can see how their gestural composition prefigured what I developed in hard-edge form many years later.

Untitled, oil on canvas with collage, 91 x 61 cm (36 x 24 in), 1958

In 1959, Elaine de Kooning came to the university as a visiting artist. Elaine's influence on me had to do with the energy and guts of being an artist. She conveyed the attitude that an artist's ability came from uninhibited action. For her, painterly hesitation meant timidity and pictorial weakness. She was also a great intellectual in my mind, a person who understood art and art history. One had to think and be smart to be around Elaine.

Elaine was responsible for my introduction to the New York art world. In 1960 she organized a show entitled 14 Albuquerque Painters for the Great Jones Gallery in New York and included my work. Although still an undergraduate, I thought my professional career had begun when the show was reviewed in ArtNews and The New York Times. Elaine encouraged me to move to New York when I graduated, but I wavered. Without money, I certainly couldn’t have survived in New York, even with the artist’s assistant jobs Elaine said would be plentiful. A conservatism ingrained by my father's many tales of his Depression era poverty stopped me.

JK: So you returned to Chicago.

WC: My father stopped supporting me, and soon I found employment at Montgomery Ward as an entry level copywriter. I stayed two years while continuing to make art in my small apartment. When I moved to a better position at the Skill Power Tool Corporation, I rented a storefront studio with Robert Lewis, a painter friend from my Art Institute school days. We were both very influenced by Hans Hofmann and I was also influenced by Lewis' work that was painted thickly with spatulas.

Untitled, oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm (36 x 36 in),1963

I considered the 1963 painting my most successful work up to that time because I felt I had built it—almost as if I had used bricks and mortar. I thought it suggested something of sky and ground, but I wasn't seeking representation.

That year, I met my future wife, Kathy Onderak, who encouraged me to pursue art and graduate education. We married, I quit my job, and I began MFA study at the University of Chicago. There, I turned away from abstraction and began to draw and paint the figure. I began an intensive study of art anatomy but ultimately realized I was more interested in the curious shapes of bones, sinews and muscles than I was in the figure. For a while I made both abstract and figural paintings, but by the time I finished my MFA I was back to abstraction.

JK: Your first teaching job was at a community college and you were fully engaged with abstraction.

WC: When I returned to abstraction after my figural episode, I thought of abstract shapes as organic metaphors of tendons, limbs, muscles. I began making abstract reliefs from plywood cut into geometric and quasi-organic shapes with a jigsaw. They suggested animal gestures. I did the same with mylar shapes backed with magnets and placed on metal sheets. These could be moved around to make intuitive cartoon-like compositions.

Variable Relief, painted mylar with magnets and steel, 76 x 107 cm (30 x 42 in), 1968

I experimented with installations, placing colored blocks on buildings, and I made a few irregular wall objects. The big change was the crisp edge of the cut wood and plastic. When I started painting again, I arranged compositions of entangled shapes similar to the jigsaw reliefs. I used tape to draw and "cut" the shapes just as I had drawn with the jigsaw or knife. That was the start. I made my first hard-edge painting in 1970.

Untitled, oil on canvas, 165 x 152 cm (65 x 60 in), 1970

JK: Your edges got sharper and your shapes more simplified, as we can see in Mondovi.

WC: This was one of the first paintings where I greatly simplified the cutout compositions using sweeping bands and tubes of heightened colors. My experiments with sculpture and real space installations, plus my earlier representational work, made it easy for me to move into illusionism. I made a very conscious decision to see what I could do with illusionist abstract form, knowing full well that it echoed early 20th century abstraction, as in Kandinsky, Dove and others.

Mondovi, oil on canvas, 163 x 155 cm (64 x 61 in), 1970

I wasn't interested in flat Greenbergian painting. I felt it was too limited, that it wrongly excluded the fullness of what painting could be. After all, I reasoned that any mark on the flat surface will allude to something it's not, to something else. And since any mark will also have an illusionist relation to its surrounding space, why not admit illusionsim and develop it robustly? I wanted my paintings to include multiple allusions and paradoxical illusionist space.

At this time I began to title my paintings. Mondovi is the name of the Wisconsin town where I spent summers as a child. Thereafter, titles became very important, although never really descriptive except as allusions to autobiographical incidents or to abstraction itself, as if shapes and colors also have their own autobiographical content.

JK: You'd really found your artistic voice by then.

WC: By 1970, I was on the path I've pursued ever since. I began to exhibit more in the Midwest and received recognition. New teaching opportunities opened up for me, and we moved back to Chicago in 1971 where I obtained a teaching position and chairmanship of the Department of Art and Art History at DePaul University.

JK: Flossy's Night was an important painting at that time.

WC: In this painting, I used a deep red-black ground, scraping away seemingly arbitrary shapes as I worked. This was a very messy process. The canvas became so loose from heavy scraping and sanding that I had to restretch it two or three times. I became frustrated and confused and suddenly preoccupied with painful memories of my mother's last illness and death in 1959. I wanted to save the painting just as I had tried to save her after she had fallen in weakness. The painting's organic shapes alluded to ungainly movement and a sense of entrapment. It was abstract—but it was also her. The painting became a symbolic portrait of my mother's final hours in delirium.

Flossy's Night, oil on canvas, 160 x 157 cm (63 x 62 in), 1972

Flossie's Night seemed to justify my commitment to abstract form while also enabling the expression of human feeling and action. I realized that pure abstraction necessarily alludes to our paradoxical, psychologically charged inner lives, and I wanted that to be evident though never explicitly narrative.

JK: Paintings such as Flossy's Night have a surreal quality.

WC: It has illogical light, uninhabitable space, dreamy dark depths and the suggestion of animated but still abstract form. I called it "surreal abstraction." I didn't set out to paint in this style. Rather, it was natural result of two soures of influence. One was my acquaintance with Chicago Style art that was so imbued with surreal content and psychological narrative—what Donald Kuspit once called the "Madness of Chicago art." The other was the New Mexico landscape, native culture and the Transcendental Painting Group artists.

JK: Despite these affinities, you felt out of touch with the current art scene.

WC: There were controversies about the relation between Chicago Style abstraction and the reductive abstraction in New York, complicated further by the hugely influential Chicago Imagist art. I felt that my work, with its surreal, allusive formalism, didn't fit in anywhere. Yet I also felt it was a valid alternative to mainstream abstraction. I felt a kinship to earlier abstract painting of the 1920s and 30s where allusion to objects and space was so richly amplified.

The painting Exile began with a very complicated composition. Working intuitively, I began to subtract shapes, reminding myself of Picasso's admonition that it's not what goes in but what's taken out that counts. Shapes were exiled, I pretended, just as I imagined myself in exile from the current scene.

Exile, oil on linen, 132 x 122 cm (52 x 48 in,) 1976

JK: Increasingly, your subsequent work contained strong diagonal thrusts and a sense of barely restrained energy.

WC: I used an X composition format many times during the 1970s and 80s. I liked the dynamic it offered. The early Greek sculptors devised a pinwheel-type figure that evolved into running figures of stunning grace and formal beauty. Mindful of the pinwheel motif, I decided that mythology with its shape-shifting symbols and metamorphic figures was akin to my pictorial interests. I liked the idea of one thing being perceived as something else, and that as something else and so on. We project our changing recognitions and meanings, and the painting accepts them, mirroring them back to us. So I gave many of my paintings mythological titles.

Atala, oil on linen, 152 x 137 cm (60 x 54 in), 1979

JK: And what about beauty?

WC: A painting may be led to beauty as a kind of surrender. I never set out to make a beautiful painting as a first priority. The stakes aren't high enough. I want to make a symbol of life and feeling, barely controlled and balanced. If I do that well, then the painting will be beautiful in a forceful way—like the dangerous New Mexico landscape—not as a surrender to comforting solace. I prefer an aggressive, disconcerting kind of beauty. When the painting is perceived as a metaphor or surrogate of selfness, it may be disconcerting but also strangely expansive. Perhaps that is beauty, too.

JK: The mood is more serene in East Troy, below.

East Troy, oil on canvas, 122 x 102 cm (48 x 40 in), 1984

WC: My parents had a gracious summer lake home near East Troy, Wisconsin where they had intended to retire. But they both died too early to make much use of it. In this painting—as in Exile—I used a vertical central shape to divide the composition. It sets up a melancholy conflict between left and right and a pictorial struggle for synthesis—a yearning. The central shape divides like a sword yet unifies like a column. There are allusions to water, sky, landscape, times of day and night, interior, exterior, change, stasis, threat and fear. Allusions crowd into consciousness while I'm painting, and I sometimes acknowledge them with a color or a twist of shape, but my formal concerns for composition and color are the first priority. Titles come last, provoked by the formal and narrative allusions.

JK: In a number of subsequent works we witness an energetic swirling of overlapping forms.

WC: Broadway was the biggest painting I had done up to 1985. It's a crowded, clashing composition of organic, quasi-floral and architectural shapes against a horizon evoking Lake Michigan and sail rigging. In Chicago, I grew up living between the lake and Broadway, the nearest commercial street. I was deeply attracted to the loud noises—the wooden red streetcars of the 1940s—and the visual clutter of Broadway as a contrast to the quiet emptiness of the nearby park and lake. These were two worlds—one real, exciting, crowded, dangerous, enticing; the other dreamy, escapist, eerie, lonely, quiet. The painting is an abstract symbol of the paradoxical nature of life and art—presence and absence, action and repose—frozen for a moment in uncertain equilibrium.

Broadway, oil on canvas, 147 x 305 cm (58 x 120 in), 1985

During the 1980s I became fascinated by the history of Chicago and its central role in shaping America's economic and architectural development in the 19th century. Even in the early 20th century there was a belief that Chicago would not only be the world's largest city, but also the world capital of culture and the arts. My paintings from this time were energized by my feelings of identity with the elegant formal violence of Chicago's face to the world. In Ogden Field—an allusion to both the hard-fisted early pioneers like Mayor Ogden and the wistful prairie where they built the city—I wanted the curled leaf-like shapes to evoke blades or knife points, danger, smoke, fire, attack and retreat, but in ritual make-believe, as if choreographed and safe for today's actors.

Ogden Field, oil on canvas, 114 x 142 cm (45 x 56 in), 1988

JK: Calvary Park is filled with vertical forms that create a sense of ascension.

WC: Here I wanted to get away from my nocturnal paintings. I'd begun teaching at Northwestern University in 1984. On my drives to the University, I passed Calvary Cemetery on the shore of Lake Michigan. The cemetery has many tall gravestones from the 19th century. The shoreline is banked with limestone blocks to offset storm waves and flooding. Those blocks are packed with tiny fossils—nature's cemetery. I thought of the painting as a resurrection of the spirits, both human and those far more ancient.

Calvary Park, oil on canvas, 183 x 152 cm (72 x 60 in), 1986

JK: Your work became more rectilinear.

WC: In the late 80s, I began to use more elements that echoed the edges of the canvas. I even measured the verticals and horizontals and used rulers to get them right. Overall, my work swings between baroque and classical, open and closed, dynamic and static. Sometimes when I've done a very complex dynamic painting, the very next one will be simple and calm. I don't really work in series but go from work to work. The similarity among paintings is simply the preoccupation I have with certain shapes or colors for a while. In this sense, Newberry Window was affected by a desire for order. It alludes to architecture.

Newberry Window, oil on canvas, 147 x 137 cm (58 x 54 in), 1990

JK: Native Range contains allusions to your student days and—as is so often the case in your work—to more universal themes.

Native Range, oil on canvas, 190 x 196 cm (75 x 77 in), 1992

WC: Making this painting, I had many thoughts of my time in New Mexico and learning about Southwest Native American culture. I regard Native Range as a landscape painting but one animated by dance and symbol. It's like a figure in ceremonial costume invoking the spirits of nature or ancestors. But I didn't want to create a localized landscape. I wanted something symbolic of a human resonance with nature, a fusion of some kind—of intellect, belief, movement, closeness and yet separation, too.

JK: The strong diagonal in October counters the otherwise fairly stable composition.

October, oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm (60 x 60 in), 1996

WC: The strong diagonal adds a strenuous reach in this painting, veering away from vertical support and offsetting its calm, relaxed sense. I was going though a very anxious period in my life at this time, and I think I was trying to find refuge in my painting.

Kathy and our children encouraged me to work through my crisis. For the sake of fun, we took a short trip to a circus museum, and I was invigorated by the whole experience. The circus, I thought, is the perfect metaphor for art and the artist. It's a ritualized event in which the performers mock death and failure through seemingly impossible and foolish acts. The circus animals represented unruly nature, the high wires were death defying, the performers were mocking their skills as much as the dangers they faced. The overwrought circus wagons indulged a vulgar affection for extravagance and misappropriated mythology. It was a huge experience for me, totally unexpected.

I began new paintings on the theme of the circus. I hadn't worked with a series before or even with a unifying theme, but I was so affected by the metaphorical and visual possibilities of the circus that my period of doubt and depression lifted. Kathy bought me some new, very expensive colors I had never used before and I began to paint them straight from the tube, excited by their vividness—vulgar, like the circus. I made a group of Circus paintings and exhibited them the following year with much success


Circus I, oil on collage, 203 x 76 cm (80 x 30 in), 1997	Circus II, oil on canvas, 203 x 76 cm (80 x 30 in), 1997

These were the first two Circus paintings I made. The compositions were intuitive, unplanned and only slightly altered in the course of painting. I used a lot of variety in the edges, as if to suggest that no rule was at work here or at least the rules would be subverted by playful, willfully arbitrary elements. Although the circus is a highly ritualized and formal event, the clowns are there to subvert pretense and expose vanity.

I also remembered going to the circus as a kid spending summers in a Wisconsin farm town—how the summertime circus seemed to magically appear in a desolate field, fill up the place with such energy and excitement and then leave behind the same desolate place, all tramped down, worse for wear, and lonelier.

Ringmaster, oil on canvas, 173 x 305 cm (68 x 120 in), 1998

Ringmaster is the largest of the Circus paintings. In formal terms, the painting shows my growing interest in geometric shapes, rectangles and circles joined with the organic bands and loopy shapes of my earlier work. I employed these shapes playfully, guided by the overall entertainment sensibility of the circus. Just as the ringmaster orchestrates the activities in the circus rings, so does the artist control the diverse and competing attractions of the composition. Beyond, a moody landscape evokes the inherent melancholy of artificial rituals.

Comparing Ringmaster with an earlier large work like Broadway from 1985, it's evident that I was seeking a simpler, more dramatic arrangement of shapes in shallower space in the newer works. The Circus paintings marked my shift from dark, tonal colors to more saturated colors. While brighter and flatter, they are still imbued with an atmospheric sort of narrative.

JK: To the East Were Moving Waters suggests a view toward Lake Michigan.

To the East Were Moving Waters, oil on canvas, 154 x 244 cm (60 x 96 in), 2001

WC: I was commissioned to make a painting for an apartment in a building designed by Mies Van Der Rohe. The building is a classic example of his steel and glass grid architecture. The painting would face the glass wall overlooking Lake Michigan. I remembered Nelson Algren's masterpiece, Chicago: City on The Make, published the same year that the building was erected, 1950. The first sentence is, "To the east were the moving waters as far as the eye could follow." I wanted to make a work that would allude to Algren and Van Der Rohe, as if reflecting moving waters seemingly fused with a Miesian grid. This was not the first time I thought of a painting as an abstract window, a symbol of the Chicago landscape transformed by human enterprise.

JK: Your Iron Heart City series also dealt with the theme of the city.

WC: I had been reading about the early period in Chicago's labor movement—the unchecked industrial growth, extraordinary exploitation, pollution, and crime. The Iron Heart City paintings commemorate the idealism that always underlies social strife and change. Although I wanted to make strong and colorful compositions, I also wanted to suggest the discordant nature of urban life.

Anarchist, oil on wood, 61 x 66 cm (24 x 26 in), 2002

In Anarchist, I thought the small dark circle, so dense and volumetric, was like a little bomb about to explode. Though my paintings are abstract and formal, they become containers for the thoughts, reveries, and concerns I have while making them. The formal and the allusive mingle—formal composition becomes a pictorial narrative.

JK: You provide glimpses into a deep, yet ambiguous spce that seems to open up beyond the canvas.

V-Day, oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm (60 x 60 in), 2005

WC: There's never a clear figure-ground relationship in my paintings even though one is implied. I do this to maintain a flat or shallow space and at the same time imply illusionist depth. Pictorial space is paradoxical and my shapes and compositions exploit that. The title, V-Day, suggests the heraldic, victorious, declarative nature of the composition. The slightly organic nature of the shapes suggests their bending and leaning toward one another. That figural association is something I try to incorporate into formal celebratory abstraction.

Compatriot, oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm (60 x 60 in), 2006

Compatriot has the feeling of shapes moving across the picture as well as moving in and out. They work together to make a somewhat muscular display. To me, the composition suggests figural action. It conflates the geometric division of space with transgressive figural movement. Allusions to stepping, running, reaching—to anatomical flexing—are evident.

JK: Color is exuberant is much of your recent work.

WC: In Chinatown, I wanted to make a painting with dynamic circular shapes and strong artificial color. The acidic colors and swirling shapes reminded me of the festival dances I've seen in Chicago's Chinatown. Diagonal lines structure the space with geometric divisions

Chinatown, oil on canvas, 165 x 165 cm(65 x 65 in), 2007

The ringed target-like circle near center of the canvas is a newer motif. I think I took it from Kandinsky. Here, the central circle is a focus for the dynamic of the work. Everything in the painting is pulled toward or strains away from the circle.

In Red Trolley, I wanted the most intense colors possible. Each shape was repainted several times to build up the density of the color.

Red Trolley, oil on canvas, 168 x 76 cm (66 x 30 in), 2007

From the beginning I wanted to suggest the cacophony of a noisy commercial urban street such as I remember from childhood when I walked to and from school. The clattering streetcars jammed the street, screeching and rumbling under a canopy of wires and signs. It was joyful, loud, crowded. It's one of those childhood street memories that stays with me. Perhaps this is augmented by the fact that we still live in my childhood neighborhood. Thus the strongest impressions of my youth are always mingled with my new experiences of the city streets.

JK: Chicago is a large painting you recently made for the new McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago.

Chicago, oil on canvas 396 x 488 cm (156 x 192 in), 2007

WC: Here, there's no longer so much thrust and counter-thrust. Moving into and out of the picture replaces a back and forth across the picture. I think of this work as a symbolic landscape. The implied view is toward Lake Michigan, but it's interwoven with shapes that seem like moving parts—large mechanisms, tubes, tracks, wires. It's also figural. It runs, reaches, builds and works. It's a symbol of Chicago and the industrial and human energy of a great American metropolis.

JK: The linear shapes often seem to bar us from entering the space—perhaps like guardians.

WC: I suppose it's true. I'm barring the enticements of deep space and at the same time protecting us from them. The city is like that: all clutter and conflict up close, distraction and movement, the here and now, while the distance is calm, open, empty—and perhaps more dangerous as well.

JK: Sketching has always been an important part of your practice.

WC: I'm always making small sketches for possible paintings. The strongest motivation is to develop new shapes and compositions or to subvert what I've already done. All artists need to explore and push the limits of their ideas both by working with and against their impulses. Out of the dozens of little sketches I make every week, there may be one, often none, that can inspire a new painting.


sketch, 2005	sketch, 2004

Most often, after making many sketches I just begin painting without any specific choice, but somehow the sensibility of some of them congeal on the canvas. The scale of a composition is crucial. My sketches are always made with some size and scale in mind. That's why I often draw imaginary viewers to help me imagine the work in a given size.

William Conger with Bandit, oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm (60 x 60 in), 2007

Bandit was given that title because it stikes me as an aggressive painting, in your face, more on the surface than many others I've done. It allows little space to escape into. The artist is a bandit, wanting to rob the viewer's attention and sensibility. Art is a bandit,too, confronting art history like a mugger, ready to take whatever will replenish its self-indulgence.

JK: Where do you see your work heading?

WC: Lately I've been making more elaborate sketches using watercolor. I suspect they will influence my paintings. I think I'm heading toward more complicated shapes, more lyrical use of line and color. Yet all bets are off. I really can't predict what will happen in my next painting or where that will take me. But I'm eager to go there.