| These paintings are part of a series I began in late 2002 through early 2003, a year after my mother’s death. For the previous 25 years, I had worked entirely in welded steel, as a self-taught sculptor of animals and imaginary creatures. My formal education was in science (Biology and Pre-med), and the animal sculptures reflected my love of the natural world. The JourneyIn 2000, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For the next 13 months, throughout her illness, I cared for her. I was with her when she died. This was my first confrontation with the reality and profoundness of death. I felt awed by the sense that her death was a transition, a continuation and a rebirth of some kind. | 
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William M. Allen is a Wisconsin-based artist whose work will be on view in August at Gallery Fifty in Traverse City, Michigan.
These paintings are part of a series I began in late 2002 through early 2003, a year after my mother’s death. For the previous 25 years, I had worked entirely in welded steel, as a self-taught sculptor of animals and imaginary creatures. My formal education was in science (Biology and Pre-med), and the animal sculptures reflected my love of the natural world. In 2000, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For the next 13 months, throughout her illness, I cared for her. I was with her when she died. This was my first confrontation with the reality and profoundness of death. I felt awed by the sense that her death was a transition, a continuation and a rebirth of some kind.
During those 13 months I had no desire or energy to weld the steel sculptures that I had made for so long. Yet, I had a stronger need than ever to express myself. So I began sketching. I filled journal after journal with spontaneous drawings—visual expressions of my experience. About a year after my mother’s death, my drawings became the seeds for a series of mostly black and white paintings on wood. They represent my beginning attempts at an inquiry into the nature of death. I discovered that painting offered me a much freer, more spontaneous means of exploration than welded steel.
These paintings are expressions of the emotional suffering that comes with the loss of a precious individual’s life and the striving toward the surrender to a greater, unknown infinite. They are about passing from one existence to a mysterious other. I look into the void, where individual life fades and merges with the infinite energy of creation, perhaps to be reborn. This is the “interface” between the physical and the spiritual. I realize that perhaps all I can do is to surrender to this ride.
I’m not a religious person. However, I do believe in art. I believe in art as a journey, a process that aids us in exploring our attempts to understand the great mystery, the unknowable. As I experience more death and infirmity with my family and friends, I feel a need to prepare for my own death. Perhaps by imagining this process and creating this world through my art I’m developing my own story. That story may help me to prepare and evolve a sense of death’s inevitability. Since I made these black and white paintings, my art has changed greatly. It has become progressively more colorful, abstract and energetic. I view this current work as less personal and emotional, but more spiritual than the black and white series. Despite the change in my work, the themes of death, transformation and a movement toward light and energy continue to form the basis of my art.
