Drawing with Both Hands: Automatic and Expressive Drawing

Artist Biography

William Downs was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina and lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Downs’ studio practice varies from drawing, painting, murals and printmaking to experimenting with installation and three-dimensional studies. The line is his current notable element, which he considers both paradoxically fundamental and surreal based on its infinite capabilities. His work expresses truth in common forms turned ambiguous. His use of repetition distorts what one expects to be or be true. Are his forms containers or do they find themselves contained by culture? Time and certainty lose their structure when one looks at figures that reform and deform simultaneously. Downs has taught drawing workshops at Anderson Ranch and Arrowmont and was a professor of Drawing and Painting at The Cooper Union and Maryland Institute College of Art.