Brad Cooper Gallery

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM PACHNER

Born in Czechoslovakia, I have been an American citizen for over half a century. I first came to Florida in the Fall of 1951. Like the work of every true artist, my work is sustained by two sources--my personal experience of life in the world and by art history. The first of these is primary, hopefully accounting for the authenticity of my work. For the past decade (since 1982) my work has been solely in black and white. This circumstance strips it of any tendency to embellish or charm the eye. I have attempted to suggest a sense of color through black and white when the work calls for it. While the discipline of one's working procedure is born of a conscious intellect, all of my work issues from the promptings of inner necessity.

The sources of the work lie in the earliest perceptions, visual memories and fantasies of one's earliest years. The forms in that body of work called landscapes derive quite naturally from the topography of one's native grounds. Its organic development, its formal growth I owe entirely to my great good fortune of having had the privilege of working in this country in an atmosphere of untrammeled freedom of expression.

The resultant work itself informs me of certain recurrent themes, of certain persistent images. Quite roughly speaking, they could be categorized as follows: landscapes in the broadest sense of the term; lovers (sometimes called interiors or the matrimonial bed, etc..) doors, passages, trains trucks and windows; work celebratory in praise of all life, animate and inanimate: works dealing with death but never morbid, but essentially of a deeply tragic nature dealing with departures and an all-pervasive sense of loss: and finally, works embodying destruction, brutality, insensitivity, general disintegration of values and the crumbling of an order no longer sustainable.

In my 54th year as a working artist I strive to convey the sense of human experience in all its complexity with ever greater directness and fidelity to my roots.

William Pachner February, 1992