February 2024
William Wright and Sara Lee Hantman
“Do you laugh, or do you cry? It’s one of those. Take your choice.”
—William Wright
Saul Appelbaum speaks with William Wright and Sara Lee Hantman on the occasion of Wright’s exhibit Standing on Fishes at Sea View Gallery in Los Angeles.
William Wright (b.1971, London, UK) is a London-based artist who paints from memory and imagination, taking inspiration where personal life and studio practice intersect on a daily basis. Intimate in scale and muted in palette, Wright’s paintings evolve over several weeks and sometimes months through a repetitive reworking of the canvas through painting, sanding down, and re-painting. This meditative process imbues a unique sense of time, contemplation, and texture throughout the work. Wright has held solo exhibitions at Sea View, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Galerie Ariane C-Y, Paris, FR (2023); Seventh House Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Lyndsey Ingram, London, UK (2022); and The Art Stable, Dorset, UK (2019).
Sara Lee Hantman is the founder and director of Sea View, a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Inviting intergenerational dialogues between artists and designers within an intimate, historical context, Hantman has curated exhibitions with emerging and established artists such as Etel Adnan, Kelly Akashi, Kathryn Bradford, Julie Curtiss, Jessie Homer French, Ana Mendieta, Jorge Pardo, Shio Kusaka, Salvo, Alison Saar and Frank Walter. Previously, Hantman moved from New York in 2014 to direct Venus Over Manhattan's 14,000 sq. ft. satellite gallery space in Los Angeles, after which she became senior director of Various Small Fires for six years before opening her own gallery in Los Angeles.
William Wright, Beethoven’s Skull, 2023, oil on canvas, 12 x 10 inches
William Wright, Goldfish, 2023, oil on canvas, 18 x 14 inches
Saul Appelbaum: William, I love the title of your current exhibit, Standing on Fishes, after the Rilke poem Moving Forward. I read it several times, and the representation of the ebbs and flows of the creative process struck me.
The drama in the poem happens internally and could be anywhere, like in a forest, a home, or a rollercoaster. It is an excellent analogy for your practice, as if internal creative life can make prosaic settings into an epic drama or rollercoaster.
Your practice is uniquely situated in daily life, yet from some subjects; I feel there’s an intense emotion that “pours outward,” drawing from the dramatic language in the poem.
William Wright: The whole feeling behind the poem struck me. It’s called Moving Forward, which would make a good title for the show. I was at a point in my personal and professional life where I’d made significant decisions and took a leap of faith in my studio practice. A line in the poem says, “It seems that things are more like me now.” And I thought, well, that’s true. Sometimes, things that don’t make sense can mean everything and nothing simultaneously. So that’s how that stuck.
S.A. Will you talk about your imagery? Does it tap into a historical lineage in painting?
W.W. There are many references to other painters like Matisse and Picasso. When I paint flowers, I don’t overthink what they are. With the sunflowers in the current exhibition, there was something positive about them. And you can only take on that subject with the obvious association. I like that. But equally, it has the door in there. I was thinking of Dorothea Tanning—the painting where there’s the corridor with the sunflower. I’ve made paintings where the goldfish is another reference. Cézanne, he’s been in one or two. I’m having a little bit of fun with it. It’s nice to have that different tone to the work as well. There’s something slightly absurd in some of the choices. So it’s not all the same pace.
S.A. You have some Cézanne apples behind you.
W.W. Conquering Paris with an apple.
S.A. Conquer. That’s dramatic. What do you think about dramatic moments in the imagery?
W.W. Most artists are obsessed with death, which is a motivation, right? Turning fifty, losing both my parents, but having twins, and all these things happening within about five years sends you in a direction. But something like a skull, it’s also a positive image. In this exhibition, the painting Beethoven’s Skull was a fluke. I’ve kept a bit of newspaper with the headline “Beethoven’s Skull Returned to Vienna” [shows newspaper].
S.A. Are you okay with me taking a screenshot? Will you hold it up to the camera?
Saul Appelbaum, Narrative Fieldwork: William Wright, 2024
W.W. I use a stack of newspapers to clean my brushes. That headline was a surprise while I was making the painting. So that’s where that title came from. It’s a neat reference. I was making a whole series of flowers around the time that my father died. I also wanted them to be tough images so they weren’t too pretty. It also relates to the garden. My garden at home was beneficial to me through that period. Once you start planting and growing, it connects you to something fundamental. Before that, I wasn’t too conscious of changing seasons. Things happen and continue, and suddenly, you feel things more intensely.
S.A. You said the skull is positive. How so?
W.W. Well, an image of a skull can remind you of death. But it also reminds you of the need to get on with things. You only have so much time to get things done. There’s something absurd in the image. Do you laugh, or do you cry? It’s one of those. Take your choice.
Installation view, William Wright, Standing on Fishes, Sea View, 2024
S.A. Sara, why did you choose William for Sea View on a programmatic and personal level?
Sara Lee Hantman: I was always attracted to William’s work because the stillness resonated with me. Coming to Los Angeles from New York and seeing the landscape in this incredibly diverse and discordant city, I thought I had just left New York; why would I situate the gallery anywhere that resembles a city? There are mountains and incredible vistas here. I wanted to explore that. It was magnetic to me because of its meditative quality. And, of course, William’s work embraces that as well. In a sea of imagery online and all of the new galleries opening in the United States, I hadn’t seen anything so still and quiet in its delivery. It was so refreshing to come across his work.
On an even more personal level, they speak to me as someone who spends all her time working with artists. Creativity is sometimes challenging to find and keep up with. As someone who aspires to routine and has yet to achieve it ultimately, William’s paintings speak to this search for creativity through focus and repetition. All kinds of incredibly talented people have talked about this.
Rick Rubin came out with a book on achieving greatness through routine and meditation, or routine as meditation. David Lynch talks a lot about distilling your day down to specific routines to charge them with this opportunity for magic. That fine line between the mundane and the magical attracted me to William’s work because it is universal and essential for all artists of any medium or background. It’s something that we need to be willing to channel as well. It requires an attention to detail to achieve.
I find that Sea View and the space embody that, whether showing works of a smaller scale or fine-tuning exhibitions to fit a particular type of space for a specific context. It’s about attention to a particular subject matter daily, relentlessly, for many years. That hit a personal chord.
S.A. I sometimes struggle with finding regularity and calm. I wonder if anyone ever has a clear-cut routine all the time, and it’s been helpful to accept things that are out of my control. I did a meditation retreat a while back in Northern Thailand. At the retreat, I couldn’t bring myself to sit in a meditation pose for a long period like the other, more disciplined people, and I felt a little bad about that. The monks encouraged walking meditation in the garden and forest paths instead. It was nice because you’re probably not going to reach a meditative state if you’re hitting yourself over the head that you’re not good at meditation. It helped me embrace the moments of regularity and calm however they come my way while easing into discipline.
S.L.H. I respect the people who achieve a daily commitment, like meditating thirty minutes a day, but I still need the capacity in my life. I have yet to get to that transcendent space. But when I look at William’s paintings, it’s like stopping to smell the roses, so to speak, where you take a moment of pause.
Installation view, William Wright, Standing on Fishes, Sea View, 2024
S.A. Sara, what about drama in William’s paintings?
S.L.H. The dramas allow us to enter into subtle humor and humanity beyond the daily life we see through the paintings. Going back to the poetics of language, William’s work has a deeper interest in mortality. You do feel like you’re looking at his life through visual clues. That, too, is quite universal. It’s comforting to see it in the light of absurdity or humor, whether titled Beethoven’s Skull or a painting of tomatoes cut off the vine. There’s something funny about it because you know that all of these things don’t last, and for him to immortalize them through painting, there’s a nod to these art historical tropes. We cling to ideas, rework, and re-envision them. When I look at William’s work, I see philosophical grappling.
S.A. William, in art history writing, I came upon the Italian word ‘disegno’, which roughly means to invent or think while drawing, as if writing a poem. I understand that you sometimes sand down a painting before adding more layers. Sometimes, you paint over areas, building up impasto. What’s the design behind this, pun intended?
W.W. There is a natural build-up that I sometimes have to take back down. It’s also a way to disrupt something. There’s something tactile and satisfying about it. It gives you a different kind of surface to work on. When I’m working over things, the surface is often dry. They’ve been sitting for weeks. It’s like starting afresh. It’s a way of breathing life back into the surface. It’s a different practice to someone like Auerbach. His process is different because he takes everything back daily and scrapes off the wet paint. But my sanding process is not destructive in that way. That happens when I paint over things.
It’s about settling on an image. When a painting reaches a certain point, it becomes more about tiny adjustments. You’d be forgiven for not noticing the difference if you came from one day to the next. It can be a subtle shift or a change of warmth in a gray. I sometimes change relationships so minutely that it almost becomes ludicrous. But it’s knowing when to stop. It’s when you reach that point where something takes the painting out of your hands, and you don’t feel you can take it any further. Even then, I may return to it and paint over it entirely. There are occasions where subjects reappear the other way around, like this show’s lemon and sardines painting. That was a painting of a fish and a plate. It had been a painting of a bowl of lemons. And then they both appeared together.
William Wright, Sardines, 2023, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches
S.A. These formalities do make a huge difference in painting construction or design. Let’s reevaluate where we began, or language and poetics, in a different light. What about imagery, meaning, thinking, and drawing in the formal process?
W.W. At that time, I was reading a poem by Frank O’Hara called Why I Am Not a Painter. The gist of the poem is it’s about creativity and how the subject of the work isn’t necessarily overt. The poet goes to visit a painter in his studio. He’s written SARDINES across an area of the painting because “it needed something there.” On another studio visit, the painter erased parts from the painting, leaving only letters. The poet says, “Where’s SARDINES?” At the same time, the poet is writing while thinking about the color orange, but he never mentions orange in the final poem, yet he titles it ORANGES. It’s this idea that things are happening, but you don’t have to be specific about them. I love that idea then with my sardines and the lemon. That became my reference point for the poem. It was an accidental way of falling upon something that has a kind of poetry to it. It gave it another unintentional and fortuitous layer, but it seemed to be what the painting was about. Although I don’t like to say things are about something, it sums up the finished painting well, including the three previous paintings buried beneath it.
Standing on Fishes
Sea View Gallery
Los Angeles
January 14—February 17, 2024
William Wright
@williamwrightpainter
Sea View Gallery
@seaviewla
Sara Lee Hantman
@saraleehantman
Saul Appelbaum
@saulappelbaum
Saul Appelbaum is the Founding Director of The Pioneers. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master of Fine Art from the University of Chicago. Since 2001, he has worked with Harper’s Bazaar, Serpentine Gallery, ASICS Tiger, Elle, Petzel Gallery, FGP Atelier, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, InStyle, the Ann Hamilton Studio, the Jewish Federation, Transfer Gallery, Heidi Klum LLC, de Sarthe Gallery, Snoop Dog, L’Officiel, Hirmer Verlag, Kids of Immigrants, the Columbus Museum of Art, Vogue, the Singapore Art Museum, Critical Inquiry, Perry Ellis America, and Numéro.
Cover photography courtesy of The Pioneers