image will expand, but without a clear plan in mind. Having finished a panel, he 
marks up some of the adjoining lines on the next, puts away the completed page, 
and starts on the new one. This is a necessary by-product of making work out of a 
car, although I suspect that it is a genial enough methodology for the artist pre­
cisely because of the organic way in which his images unfold. This is, by the way, 
not a straightforward linear process. While sometimes multi-sheet works emerge 
sequentially, in many cases there are periods of time between worked up sheets – 
sometimes as long as a year. It’s worth noting that until very recently Will hadn’t 
seen any of his multi-panel works assembled. The result was something of a revela­
tion to him. 
Landscapes and dwellings figure large in Will’s opus. As he himself reasons, this 
emerges subconsciously as a result of having no place to live: “It’s no surprise,” he 
says, “that I might be working on housing and place. Sometimes the future doesn’t 
look very good. Sometimes you create your own fantasies. Try to make it look better. 
Putting these things down is really important.” The series, Symphony of Survival con­
sists of exuberant visions of swirling, oceanic nature. Nurturing, organic and hos­
pitable, these accumulated fragments of a yearned for place function as imaginative 
retreats from the harsh realities and privations that often beset the artist’s lived ex­
perience. Similarly with Pumpkin Castle (cf pp. 55-57). Vast and rolling, inside and 
out, here is a vision of somewhere to be, born of a proliferation of single sheet im­
ages. At one level it is a place of safety and calm, with clear sky, pure running water 
and spacious vistas. However, it is also a place that is forever in waiting; out of reach. 
The pumpkins growing on the walkways and yards of Pumpkin Castle are strangely 
petrified, eternal things. And the elaborate interior and exterior is strangely unpopu­
lated. Indeed, outside of some of the inventions and the illustrations associated with 
his in-process novel, Protégé the human figure is marked by absence. These other 
worlds are desirable places, yes. But that desire remains unfulfilled in the picture 
space. Optimism remains the overwhelming doctrine, however.  
LA Car Man
14

View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.