LA Car Man
The body of work created in the last twenty years differs in size, but at its core is 
the fundamental unit of the 11 x 14 inch drawing sheet. This is unsurprising since 
Will’s ‘studio’ consisted of his car. Similarly with his materials, which consist almost 
exclusively of pencil and colour crayon, although he did experiment briefly with 
watercolour – a medium that proved impractical because of its fluid nature and the 
time required for sheets to dry. Will nevertheless handles these simplest of artist 
materials with great skill and invention, conjuring worlds and giving material form 
to ideas. His methodologies have developed intuitively over time. As he says, “I 
went in my own direction. Working with lines and graphics. I just put down what 
pops into my head.” Every picture has its own story and relates to things that are 
happening around him in his life at each moment. Of course there are echoes of 
things that actually exist out there in the world around him in his work, appropri­
ated subconsciously into the imagined other places he reveals; ghosts of place and 
Californian vegetation. But Will’s images essentially grow out of his subconscious 
and are given form by the creative act of drawing. There is, to put it in the surreal­
ist, André Breton’s terminology, much of the automatic method in the way in which 
Will works. 
Larger images are formed by the successive adding of individual drawing sheets. 
Sometimes only a couple, as with the tumultuous, almost Blakean sea and sunrise 
in an untitled landscape, or Car 6 (cf p. 21), which races incongruously through a 
precipitous grotto. Another image, Car 8 (opposite) consists of three panels piled 
up vertically, suggesting at once past, present and future in its crashing together 
of pictorial elements – retrofuturistic automobile, hand-hewn rock walls and tree-
born pyramid structure. This image also points to a fusion of nature (the trees and 
landscape), mysticism (the pyramid) and rational invention (the car). Two others il­
lustrated here consist of multiple sheets. Pumpkin Castle consists of nine individ­
ual sheets, while its companion piece, Pumpkin Castle Interior consists of at least 
thirteen. I say ‘at least’ because the growth of these multiple panel images is or­
ganic. Will always begins with a single sheet, perhaps with the assumption that the 
12
Right “Untitled” (Car #8), 2015. Colored pencil on paper, 11 x 14 inches per panel.

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