William Salit

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Neighborhood: Mission
Group Affiliation: 1890 Bryant Street Studios
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In art and in life, I am drawn to the blurry--and possibly imaginary--boundary between the solitary and the interconnected. Years of figurative work and portraiture led to a return to academia to study the workings of the body: chemistry, physiology, microbiology, and anatomy, including dissections of cadavers.

Those studies have filtered through to my work and thinking.

Recent paintings are explorations into the way life evolves and organizes into ever greater levels of complexity. Some of these images began as figure studies and others are built from a base-layer of photographic imagery from advertising. These images are replaced by portraits of sitters or are subsumed in a maelstrom of organic improvisation, in a growth of joints, limbs, tubules, viscera, teeth, animal and plant parts, and microscopic life.