2022 Catalogue Archive

William Atkinson’s life has taken many roads. He began his professional life as a police officer, and due to his work with community engagement and education was recruited to be an instructor for the US Military. After his career with the military ended, he shifted his energies to the art world, working in gallery settings and making his own work. His recent body of mixed media paintings merge expressionist passages, collaged elements, street-art mark-making, and text mark-making to form tableaus that meditate on contemporary life. Out of the Woods plays on the phrase’s moment-in-time pivot between a difficult past to a peaceful future, conjured by the juxtaposition of the word “chaos,” eye-cancelled images of old men, and images of street debris with the small image of a Zen garden in the upper right. Atkinson has shown his work throughout the US and Europe.