William Otton

Background
During the opening years of the twentieth century a new kind of fine art painting emerged in Western European art centers. It was a trend that gained major attention – often controversial – as academic illusionism was being replaced by a new kind of art created by avant-garde artists. These artists rejected the rules demanded by those interested in academic fine art with its focus on representational imagery. Painting was moving into an era where “Art about Art” replaced the emphasis on“Art about Life”.
Art about Life focused on how successfully an artist could dissolve a picture plane and introduce subject matter in a way that often mirrored the visible world and depicted a particular place, event, story or people.
the new Art about Art focused on using the elements of art as an important part of the content of a work. It sought to manipulate the surface of the painting, depicting an abstracted kind of imagery as compared to the earlier Art about Life that sought go make images have more verismilitude in a space that mirrored the visible world.
Various movements emerged that continued to further the shift the focus from representational painting toward abstraction and to a flattened picture plane on which loosely painted images might be included such as Cubism. In many cases the brush marks became an important part of the content of a painting as they depicted a new kind of image that was unique to painting.
By the mid 20th century, Action Painting had totally removed any reference to images found in the visible world resulting in a fully abstract format. However, by the later decades of the century artists like Any Warhol reintroduced representational images into Modern Art and in doing so helped raise the question about the future importance of abstraction.

Today
Since the beginning of the 21st century there has been a focus on issues related to “multiculturalism” across society and efforts to replace what many call the colonial derived “melting pot” outlook of the past with a new way to look at history, current affairs and the future. This new thinking is thought to be the best way for western culture to move forward. Questioning the melting pot approach of past centuries has impacted the development of fine art today. It has also impacted the art history discussed in the above paragraphs which sought a single line of art development including a specific group of artists and an exclusion of diversity and multi points of view.
Yes, a melting pot approach to defining culture and fine art has strong weaknesses. In fine art it includes limited acceptance of works created by women and people of color as well as any major focus on social issues, political points of view and topics that fall outside the parameters of defining what constitutes a masterpiece.
Today multiculturalism has a major impact on what artists create in their studios and how art history is being rewritten to better serve this new way of looking at culture. As these changes occur there is are efforts in some art circles to discount the fine art developments of the last 150 years and replace it with a new view of what actually happened from a multicultural point of view and discounting many of the contributions that were accepted as valid in the past.
Since 2015, when multiculturalism became a dominant influence on contemporary art making I shifted my outlook about how I viewed what was happening in fine art. I sought a way to keep the major threads of art history alive by addressing it in some way in my own works. My solution was to include the “essence” of past works into my own studio efforts.
Today my paintings include the essence of ideas, techniques and styles explored by selected artists of the last century who influenced my understanding about what makes a successful painting. I include those essences while also acknowledging 20th century Modernist reductive conventions focused on the elements of art, the two dimensional surface of the canvas and the exploration of color formed space.
Unlike many leading abstract artists of the last century I have never dropped the recognizable image from my work, no matter how abstracted it might be in a painting. I also believe that including the conventions that are part of the Modernist vocabulary can and should be integrated into my paintings. The current work seeks to successfully blend the conventions of Modernism and my interest in representational image making into each painting I create in my studio.

William Otton started his career in art as a public school teacher in Paradise, California after graduation from college. He then gained a Masters in Art from Sacramento State where his advisor, Joseph Raffael, and Committee members, Jim Nutt, John Fitzgibbon and other teachers launched him on a professional career in fine art.

He then returned to university and achieved a doctoral degree in Illinois where he studied under midwest regionalist painters, Harold Gregor and Ken Holder, who sent him on the path of leadership in organizations that further fine art in any community in which he lived.

The journey eventually took the form of museum directorships in Laguna Beach, CA, Wichita, KS, Corpus Christi, TX, and Sacramento, CA. Mr Otton now resides Marin County where he has been able to return to studio work.