Available Work

" I would like the viewer to be able to enter the painting from anywhere, and to experience it as a painting foremost - as a physical surface of strokes, marks, colors and forms - without getting caught up in the trickery of illusion; perhaps in that way I can transmit the passionate, the essentially spiritual, raw transformational gut-level experience of seeing the world out there, and within, with fresh eyes"

William Morehouse 1993

Landscape, as subject matter, has appeared in Bill's work as early as the later 1950's. First exhibited at John Bolles Galleries in both New York and San Francisco, his paintings utilized topographical features as main themes for abstract compositions. The landscape theme really emerged out of earlier paintings done while studying with Clifford Still and Mark Rothko and remained more or less a touchstone ever since.

"I started this plein-air painting to get out of a day after day grind in the studio: there is an urgency in trying to make a whole painting in a single day. I liken it to fishing. I either get one or I dont."

WM 1992

" I look for the painting in the landscape. When I see the composition, the formal elements, I set up the easel and go directly to work. No underpainting, no manipulation with driers or anything else."

By the late 1960's experiments with new materials, particularly urethane foam and polyester resins, led Bill's interests from exploring the realm of the macrocosmic landscape into the microscosmic and internal forms of the natural world. While not easy to catergorize these works as "derived from nature" his work was included in definitive and landmark exhibitions such as FUNK , at the University of California Art Museum and Boston Center for Contemporary Art, and Grotesque Art, San Francisco Art Institute, and American Icons, Spain and Germany.

"My work addresses the formal aspects of composition, whether they be contained within the tradition of the rectangle or in reference to that which lays without it. I try to bring a painterly discrimination and sensibility to the task of resolving differences between and among disparate parts, as in such series: "Dualities" and "Trilogies", or in individual installation pieces which relate directly to specific spaces. These constitute the vehicle with which I find I can enter the metaphysical and abstract, engaging in a process which helps me to transcend banality, sentimentality, politics and boredom."

Dealing with juxtapositions of energy and substance, gesture and concrete construction, these paintings - while definitely more pictorial than preceeding ones - continue the subject matter of the more abstract Dualities series begun in the late 1970's"