Words and Art by Dana Smith

William Morris is a quiet, unassuming artist who divides his creativity between video art production and playing abstract music via the guitar.  His video work was recently featured in the Media Room at the Bruno David Gallery and I had the opportunity to speak with him and specifically ask him about his creative process.

In addition to his video output he has been collaborating musically with his long time friends Thomas Sleet and Tony Patti.  When you compare his video work with his music you can detect two opposing qualities.  While the video art is short in length many hours of planning and editing went into the final piece.  His music may be 20-, 30-, or 45-minutes long but was created in the moment.

How does William resolve this?

He looks at music as a relationship between pure thought and action.  More than anything else he focuses on the here and now. You can say he subconsciously creates on the spot while playing music live or even recording.  However, his approach to video is more empirical and more precise.  His creative process is nebulous, starting in the far reaches of the mind where ideas are formed and incubate for a long period before they are transferred to visual form.  Intermingling with daily thoughts of mundane tasks such as driving, eating or cleaning, the process slowly grows until bits are visualized and technical problems are solved before any tangible work begins.

Once he starts, the work new problems arise caused simply by the act of creating.  A piece will then take a new and unknown shape.  It is almost as if the piece guides itself between a combination of the video he originally envisioned and the physical file that is being constructed in the editing timeline.  The very act of translating the original thought into a machine-language through the timeline creates the finished work.

William is telling a very carefully edited story that is about a personal Truth. A Truth that might not be fully grasp with a quick watch of a 45 second video but a Truth that grows with continued viewing.  When you look at a piece of art, whether it is video, painting, sculptor, etc… you might see the effort or the effortlessness that went into the piece and from that you can perceive a kind of Truth.  William’s videos are profound in that they convey the clarity of this Truth.  His dreams and hopes are inexplicably bound in this Truth.

William’s music and video art also has a tandem relationship in that they help feed the other.  The tedious work involved with producing a video can cause blocks in the creative process.  To bypass these blocks he can turn to music and be in the moment, escape from the boundaries that are created with video production.  Then take that freedom and apply it back to his visual art.

This process can yield wonderful results for both mediums.  Working for endless hours by yourself can be rewarding but also draining.  Letting loose with other collaborators, in this case two other musicians, purges the mind of the constraints that can tie up the creative process.  Vice-versa, after creating in a free form setting where there are few rules your mind can open to other possibilities that might have been closed off before.  Whittling those possibilities into the boundaries of another discipline, in this case William’s video art, multiplies the complexity of the thought or Truth being set forth.

Truth, which as William will tell you, is the core of all the best art.