The Other Art Fair

Chicago: An Interview with Artist Will Cares

Following the Chicago edition of The Other Art Fair in September, we interviewed a few artists who exhibited to get to know them better.

Meet Will Cares, a Michigan based artist who believes art is a journey without a destination.

Can you walk us through your process?

In my realist work, I use photographs – photographs that I have taken of places that have meant something special to me. Although I use photography to keep from straying too far from the real place, my aim to is interpret the scene, not reproduce the photographic image exactly. It is a strange act to paint from a photograph. What results never quite matches up to the detail and specificity of the real.

Instead, I am exploring and operating in the gap between the painted image and the reality, constantly navigating through and translating from the representation offered by the camera, to that allowed by the brush.

How do you know when it is finished?

I must decide when “enough is enough”, or when “more” effort or exactitude would, in an artistic sense, actually be “less”. I know that for the viewer, the art is the finished work, but for the artist it is truly the process. To me, the painting is simply an artifact that is the result of a journey.

Tell us about your more recent work.

In my recent work I am exploring new methods and materials. These artworks focus on process and often cross the boundary between painting and sculpture. The main “subject” of these works is the dialectic of seeming opposites. Some of these oppositions include 2D / 3D, white / black (with all that those words convey about opposition and race as well), clockwise / counterclockwise, life/death, Western linear time / Eastern cyclical time, and future-focused / present focused.