The Morning and the Light Outside
Bill Killebrew

About the Artist (from the Blue Spiral 1 website):
A family member who shall remain nameless once misinterpreted a song lyric to read 'I am a Southerner of nothing in particular.' (The actual reading is 'I am the son and heir…')

When informed of his mistake he was insistent that his version was the better of the two. I agree, being Southern born but having lived nearly everywhere as a child. I find that the quality defined as Southern has become metaphorical and I am left with my upbringing by well-meaning family and an abstract sense of belonging to a place and time that no longer seems to exist.

Each of my pictures is a representation of this concept, time and place as a metaphor. All my painting is abstract. I was raised by an Expressionist and even while becoming a painter of things, I have gravitated toward an aesthetic allowing for the introduction of the picture as a natural object in its own right, rather than a description of nature. Any significance achieved in the course of painting the picture is a significance drawn from memory, from upbringing and shaping by others, from a place and set of manners and morality drawn from these sources and worked out in a non-objective methodology allowing these factors to come out. Like abstract thinking, perhaps in a daze. A pattern slowly rises to the surface and makes itself apparent; the thing left in and thought to be unimportant becomes the passage that anchor the entire piece. The color quality worked out with difficulty becomes the light quality suddenly remembered.