Bill Saylor

Combining violent gestural abstraction with his own recurring personal iconography, Bill Saylor creates paintings that demonstrate a profound engagement with environmental issues such as meteorology, natural history, and marine biology. Works such as Split Flow (2017) and Double Overhead (2018) are built up with layers of sprayed, splattered, or poured paint suggestive of chemical spills, as well as other materials such as charcoal and collage. Others, like Plexus (2016) or Wake and Bake (2020) are populated by bizarre monsters, deformed sea creatures, and sinister skeletal figures, evoking the specter of imminent ecological disaster. Saylor draws from an eclectic range of influences from cave painting, graffiti art, and cartoons, to Abstract Expressionism. Using spray paint, stencils, charcoal, photographic collage, and oil on canvas, as well as making sculptural assemblages from salvaged junk, Saylor is a cultural scavenger, sifting through the detritus of our civilization, without any single definitive style to pin him down.