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About The Artist William Pettit was born on 17 May 1972 in Baltimore, Maryland. He has lived periodically in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Rome, Italy, studying Poetry and then obtaining an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art in 1996. Other residences include Martha's Vineyard, New York City, and for the last few years, in Tarano Sabina, 60 km north of Rome. The landscape paintings are based here, in Sabina, and respect the Impressionist project of documenting light which changes throughout the day, and the landscape itself which changes from season to season, year to year. |
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The abstract work derives from this: land or location being its primary subject. This is especially relevant to the artist's own movement and recent resettlement in a "foreign" land. This discovery of location is evident in Triptic for Dante, 1995, where, surrounded by architecture and its age, is the trace of humankind: a scrawled text, poetry. The Dirt Box series, 1996, also attests to this: soil (land itself) with a backdrop of Italian literture (and romantic literature, in this case Moravia's Woman) and a Borromini floorplan (land as a "political" formation) etched in the transparent surface. Again, poetry acts as evidence of human thought and sentiment, a metaphysical which surfaces among physical things, in a common place. This trace of poetry, or language, is further investigated in the "Woodstock series." Here, we see a crisis of language next to the crisis of land. Other work from the same year (fegato, trippa, zampone) focus on the bodily, the physical side of human and its sustainance. | |
| The Schoenberg series (1997; Verklarte Nacht, etc.) are nocturnes, joining the landscape and the body in their horizonal pose. Their common place is darkness, equalizing and assimilating the conditions of both (in this case, the moon is a reference point, it is both land and body). In the darkness is the final union between human and land: death, our resting place. They are also based on several musical works by Schoenberg, and are heavy, tar on wool (this also a reference to Josef Beuys, and perhaps Paul Celan). This group is somewhat tragic, as is Lo Struthof, 1996 (done after a visit to the remains of a concentration camp of the same name); tragedy here is both poetic and political. |  |
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| More recent paintings continue the search for a union or at least a compromise between the"human" and the "land", but are less tragic, at times comic. The dualities of earth and body-- the physical (the body is bloody, land dirty) and non-physical ( the thought and sentiment of humanity, and the either religious or political aspects concerning "land"*) -- meet in a decomposition and recomposition, a reduction, revisioning, and reordering of information. They are maps, national flags, constitutions, as well as charts of bodily systems, dialogues. William Pettit teaches art at John Cabot University in Rome and at The Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy. His work is shown annually in Rome and in Tarano. |
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