Sabella Exhibition Text
Jan Bryant
Billy Bob Hawkins is in the thrust of finding a new ‘zero point’ in painting, a process that will free himself from the burdens (the inculcations) of art school, while having already absorbed its secrets and virtues. He allows disparate methods to move him into unforeseen crevices, describing the search as ‘letting the chaotic mess be’. But such whimsy is more like ‘the stroke of chance’ that the Argentinian author and librarian, Jorge Luis Borges, was so fond of describing in his carefully crafted stories full of chance. And thus, although it is a time of intense studio experimentation, it would be misleading to suggest that it comes without design or as an undisciplined scattering of ideas.
There is a design of sorts in Billy Bob’s current paintings. While he’s indulging in diverse styles and materials, taking them as they come, they are held together by a neutral pallet of beiges, browns, greys, creams (no bright whites or abyss-like blacks), and occasionally a pale green stripe or a soft pink dot. And each painting is small, scaled down for an intimate encounter of viewer to work. He wants his surfaces to resist language, to emit a pre-linguistic force that releases sensational affects for the viewer. Oils, acrylics, scumbling, smudging, layering, clarity, lines, egg shells, hessian, brutalism, canvas, wood-carving, figuration, abstraction… tiny objects in the centre of empty canvases or surfaces full of content.
I need to quickly retract the inference that Bill Bob is in the midst of an experimental stage in his painting life. It would be better to suggest that he has has an ‘experimentalising’ nature, which will endure, as long as he thinks and makes things and keeps his playful spirit alight. And his work comes without hubris, just doubt and hesitancy, which might be thought of as an ethical way of being in a world that we share with others. Borges again,
I have known what the Greeks do not know, incertitude … I come from a dizzy land where the lottery is the basis of reality.
from “The Lottery of Babylon”—
Billy Bob produces melancholic paintings with moments of joy and humour. What other mood could better reflect our times?