About

"I get ideas from everywhere, from photographs, from advertising, from dreams, from other paintings. I figure anything I see is mine to use, because it resides in my vision, my memory, my dreams. I take it and transform it into something better." - Newman

For over 40 years, Bill Newman was the beating heart of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Thousands of Corcoran students have learned his methods and techniques, but it is his unforgettable joy and openness in the process of making art, whatever shape that art might take, that is his legacy as an artist and educator.

Newman has been translating mechanically produced, instantaneous images into labor-intensive paintings since the 1980s. He initially began working with computer-generated imagery to compensate for his reduced physical mobility after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1979. He pioneered a relationship between digital imagery and traditional painting techniques by using a Mitsubishi Electric, an early screen-grabbing machine that recorded stills off a television, as the source for paintings depicting emotionally fraught romances.

The relationships between representational painting and the technology that can instantly "capture" reality are the ones that consistently produce the most compelling tension in his work.

* Casey Smith

ARTIST STUDIO: spypop@aol.com

The Lay of the Land: Landforms

Where the Farm Lies

Shaded relief map of mountains and valleys that result from the erosion of plunging folds, near Strasburg, Virginia. V-shaped notches along Green Mountain, to the right of Three Top Mountain, and asymmetrical slopes of the long ridge on the right of the map indicate a syncline underlies the valley between; this valley is about 2 miles (3.2 km) wide in the upper right. A syncline also underlies Little Fort Valley with the crest of an anticline along Green Mountain. All folds plunge toward the lower left. Both the North and South Forks of the Shenandoah River, which flank the folds, display incised meanders. [From the U.S. Geological Survey Strasburg Quadrangle, 1947.]