In 1979, after failing to get into architecture school, I came upon a realization that resulted in bells going off in my head: in art you are given total, undaunted creative freedom. That is, you are free to do whatever you want in creating a visual work based on your own artistic expression. I loved this thought. I responded enthusiastically to this and decided to attend art school.

During college, while learning technical skills in various media, I devoted a full year to drawing, painting, and sculpting the form of the burnt wooden match. This developed into a search for a personal visual language and resulted in works such as sculptural totems, representational images, and expressionistic lithographs for which transfer images and scribbles were used to create this charred, wooden shape. I also did a series of photographs of subjects standing in the dark of a musty, dank basement. Using matches, I would illuminate the figure; the flame would move around the body, drawing from a totally black space by exposing the film using an open camera shutter. The experimentation done in school would influence what I accomplished later on.

I've always been interested in portraiture and have been influenced by a variety of images: religious icons, mug shots and the drawings and paintings of Alberto Giacometti. I began drawing straightforward portraits using colored pencil and oil pastel on black paper/board in 1983. I was affected by the color and shapes as they appeared from the blackness of the blank material.

I had an urge to hide the face from the viewer -- not with a mask, but with a forest of objects that would sandwich the figure between the foreground and background. I was interested in the form of the paper match and how this object can hold the potential for something much more intense (heat, damage, fear) and how a group of them can create a kind of rhythm across the expanse of the composition as they relate to the static, unmoving figure. I wanted to give the drawings depth while placing the figure and the objects in front, squarely within the confines of the composition. These portraits can be viewed as religious in nature. Each person, seeking security behind the objects and what they imply, sits precariously protected within the space that is defined by the objects in front and the shimmering, scribbled wall behind. The floating matches in front of a portrait has become a theme that I have continued to explore.

As an exercise to loosen up my drawing, I began to work on small portraits that are created by the rubbed transfer of printing inks. These images are taken from such varied places as the television screen, obituary columns, my junior high school yearbooks, miscellaneous polaroid photographs, and newspaper wedding announcements to create small, interesting portraits of ordinary, but also unusual-looking people. Color and texture plays an important role in this series of work. Color influences can be found in such varied places as the scenes of small Persian and Indian paintings, polaroid photographs, and miscellaneous magazine pictures. Textures found in the details of the urban and rural environment are sources for the backgrounds used in this work.

At one time I drew orange scribbles on people's faces from newspaper photos, and these expressive marks -- carefully outlined in black, thereby altering its character -- have now become portraits unto themselves by the layering of many distinct portrait images over the other so as to create an unrecognizable person. As a result, the scribble becomes a means to redefine a way of drawing.

Using the foundations developed by Cezanne and the cubist painters, through the early works of the abstract expressionists, a series of small collages takes representational images—sometimes altered and disfigured by scratching, erasing, tearing and smearing—and places them with many other elements to create a moody and vibrant abstract space. These collages in turn become the basis for large paintings.

I advocate art as a visual and emotional experience.To do this, I try to create works that convey something that has a lasting impression. I want the viewer to come away with a different idea of his or her’s own visual world.

William Dean Reynolds