William Lustenader

Willard Lustenader received his B.A. degree in art history at Vassar College in 1979, and his M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he concentrated on 17 th century Italian Art.

After a brief stint with a major New York gallery, he began painting full time, first approaching painting as a traditional realist then, in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties, making a foray into abstraction of related conceptual trends. This instilled in him a need for formal exploration and afforded him a fresh approach to many issues in contemporary realist painting, which he continues to pursue.

The artist states:
My work addresses a variety of themes from role-playing to time and memory relationships in both figurative and still life painting. Landscape often participates as elements in both. The function of realism as a medium in itself is explored with an interest in how the stillness of nature can create emotional responses within the viewer. The link between an image and the paint application itself is of great importance as the language of thought transportation is addressed. My paintings and drawings are quiet envelopes for reflection, not merely arrangements. A traditional, yet often varied, method of working allows me to use the light of the natural world to seductively explore an individual’s private space. In many of my compositions, bodies, objects and landscapes are combined to form links that allow one to travel through a sequence of relationships without necessarily stopping at any fixed point, but at the same time, hover in areas of reference. Hopefully, the viewer will discover something fresh with encounter as they rummage through their own baggage.

With regard to the “cut-out” still life paintings: These pictures have developed over the past two years as I combine my interests in early modernist collage and post war abstract color field painting with contemporary representational language. Aside from playing with spatial equations, they reference ideas concerning community and self.