Houston artist William Betts wins national prize for technologically-advanced paintings

The acclaimed arts magazine New American Paintings has awarded its national juried Annual Prize to William Betts, the noted Houston painter and recent interim director of DiverseWorks art space.

Betts occupies a unique place in the arena of contemporary painting, forging a name for himself in the past decade as a master manipulator of long-established artistic techniques.

A former software executive with extensive experience in the business world, Betts has has taken the craft of painting into the terrain of 21st-century industrial practice, using a series of mechanized processes that bring into question the very role of the artist in producing painted canvases.

“I used to work with traditional painting materials, canvases and brushes,” Betts told CultureMap in a recent interview. “But, after my time in the software industry, I was in a different place as an artist. I had to incorporate technology somehow to be true to myself.”

 “After my time in the software industry, I was in a different place as an artist," Betts explined. "I had to incorporate technology somehow to be true to myself.”

 The scenes in Betts' landscape work are instantly recognizable fragments of the everyday, that, in many ways, speak to the artist's former life in tech sales. His scenes of highway traffic, airport runways and faceless motel rooms are familiar yet vaguely unwelcoming, easily discernable yet blurred and distorted. 

Taken from digital surveillance technology or television news briefs, each image is transposed directly onto canvas by the artist's finely-tune studio machinery which he operates with a suite of custom-made digital software. Thousands upon thousands of pixels are converted into delicate drops of acrylic paint and precisely positioned onto a blank canvas.

Betts, who is represented in Houston by McClain Gallery, also uses these mechanical techniques to produce purely abstract works, creating orchestrated patterns of impossibly fine strips of bright enamel.

In recent years, the artist developed a process in which he drills thousands of shallow holes into the back of a mirrored Plexiglas panel. Each small void is manually filled with paint to create a pixilated interpretation of a photographic source.

“In some respects, that traditional intimacy between the artist, canvas and the paint is totally corrupted,” he explained about ongoing technical development. “As a painter today, I like to see how far I can get from those traditions and forms.”

Betts' schedule is booked solid this coming year, with a show of new mirror paintings starting Feb. 18 at the Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas as well as another solo exhibition this fall at Albuquerque's Richard Levy Gallery. From May to October, his work will appear in the exhibition Rasterfahndung (Tracing the Grid) at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.