BIOGRAPHY
b. 1971, NEW YORK CITY
William Day is an American painter known for his abstract compositions featuring colorful shapes, energetic marks and movement, and intriguing surfaces. Originally from New York and now living in Boulder, Colorado, Day can often be found in his studio working on multiple pieces at the same time. His process leads him to create paintings in series, each focusing on different nuances of the human experience. His works are comprised of textures and complex layers demonstrating his interaction with a canvas in a moment. These series of paintings all nod to certain periods of Day’s life that bring years of intensity, joy, spirituality, conflict and resolution to the canvas.
Exploring expression in a range of sizes, Day begins each new work by rolling unprimed raw canvas out on the floor. Primarily working with oil and acrylics, he creates textures and layers with various tools, discovering relationships between the colors and the unexpected structures. His monumental paintings, which tower above their viewers, are monoliths of creative freedom projecting to the world Day’s belief in the sublime powers of color and form.
Inspired by hope and beauty, burgeoned by his own personal struggles, Day is an artist whose eyes are fixed firmly on the horizon. After September 11th 2001, when Day’s wife Aimee, survived the collapse of the World Trade Towers, Day left a career in finance and studied architecture at PRATT Institute, which ultimately lead him to becoming a painter. His architectural impulsivity carried over into his style of painting with expressive actions of manipulating his implements, often those associated with construction.
Day’s work has been published in LUXE Magazine, FORBES.com, WHITEHOT Magazine, STIR WORLD Magazine, TAINTED Magazine, 5280 Magazine and he has been a TEDx Speaker. His art is featured in both private and public collections throughout the United States, Europe and North Africa and has been exhibited in galleries in New York, NY, Greenwich, CT, Boulder, CO, Miami, FL, Santa Barbara, CA, and Atlanta, GA.
CRITIC’S REVIEW
“Abstraction is not usually the means by which artists tell a story, but Will Day approaches his canvases as an opportunity to bring forth a story in the moment and not as a sequence of events.
With various surfaces serving as a field of operations, Day creates textures and complex layers which enables him to discover new relationships within each composition. Working on multiple paintings at the same time in his Boulder, Colorado studio, he reaches for an emotional power based in grand design that yet defies limits, which Day believes he attains through grace.
A reader of Joseph Campbell, he, in essence, enters each work as a path through the unknown to a self-overcoming experience. Considering himself a doer, it is the act of painting that drives each painting to where it wants to be. Day starts with a lone mark. Then he struggles with and relents to the viscous material accepting and resisting, using color as some sort of otherworldly force that aligns with or bursts out of the emerging configuration. As a youth, he was a spirited athlete and player of many sports, and so his natural inclination is expression through physicality, but now it is the means by which he seeks a higher power to tell a soul’s tale.”
Stephanie Grilli, Art Historian
Ph.D, Yale University.