William Hubschmitt:

A Retrospective Exhibition
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Main Gallery and eGallery

Tarble Arts Center
Eastern Illinois University
August 21 – September 25, 2010
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Self-Portrait as Cyclops, 2004
“As Henri Rousseau taught me, beauty is usually found in the imagination.”
Bill Hubschmitt
For many students and professors of art, the
boundary between historical inquiry and creative
exploration is broad and impermeable. Art from
the past all too often recedes in significance as the
art world seems only concerned with what is new
and original. In this climate, an art student studies
art history solely to avoid making something that
looks like work that was done before. To our great
benefit at Eastern Illinois University, Bill Hubschmitt
has continually challenged this notion with his
teaching and digital painting, and has produced
an extensive body of work that demonstrates
the creative dialogue that is possible when the
boundary between art and art history becomes
more fluid and dynamic. The premise of this work
is not to simply make art about art, but, rather, it
is to understand what it means to be an artist in
the company of other artists and belong inside the
vast history of art making.
Hubschmitt’s early digital art in the 1980s
represented a significant advance over what was
deemed possible with computers and printers that
were not designed to accommodate the needs
of an artist. He began in 1984 by using the early
Apple 512k with special expanded memory so it
could handle the enormous digital files necessary
to make large format works. Initially he was limited
to working only in black and white on printers
designed to produce large font type. Even with no
gray scale to work with, Hubschmitt developed
a technique of distorting a photograph through
repeated enlargements and reductions that
allowed the image to retain its essential identity,
but begin to take on painterly qualities as the
black and white solids broke down and allowed
for a more delicate matrix of interconnected
forms. The selective introduction of chaos and
decay into images is one of the enduring qualities
of Hubschmitt’s work. At one level this strategy
speaks to the entropy of memory—a result of the
distance between then and now. It also allows
forms to intermingle and suggest something new
as they coalesce.
Hubschmitt’s work in digital art has always gone
hand-in-hand with his interest in developing new
creative tools for studio artists and research tools
for art historians. Between 1988 and 1995 and
through the help of grants from New York State CCI
Programs, he was able to get $500,000 to help his
SUNY Oneonta students get the tools they needed
to explore new possibilities in computer-generated
art. At the same time, Hubschmitt began using
 computers to examine the compositional structure
of paintings by editing out the figures to focus
on the architectural elements that establish the
style and meaning of the work. The challenge was
not just to take the figure out, but also to extend
the continuity of the architecture by introducing
elements that filled the gaps left by the deleted
figures. In 1995, while working on editing out
the repeated number fives in Demuth’s painting,
The Figure 5 in Gold (1928), Hubschmitt felt the
need to introduce his own “corrections” to alter
the balance of the composition. At this moment,
he recognized his project was a more interpretive
process rather than simply objective observation.
While this realization ended his work with this
method of art history research, it opened up a new
interest in digitally deconstructing known works
and entering into a more creative exploration of the
artist’s methods and styles.
In an effort to help explain different artistic styles
to his students, Hubschmitt has made many of
his breakthroughs in his own art as he developed
the means to translate oil painting techniques into
digital media methods. The purpose of this exercise
was not merely to demonstrate the way the oil
painting techniques worked, but also to show how
these older methods could be applied to what
the students were doing with digital art. One of
these experiments was based on techniques that
Mark Rothko developed for his monumental and
luminous abstract paintings. Hubschmitt had had
an opportunity as a student to meet Rothko and
watch him work, and he vividly recalled Rothko’s
process of working up the painted surface to
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Figure Study “Qing” Baroque, 2007
focus on the interaction of the colors and textures.
Hubschmitt has continued to use this technique on
many of his digital paintings, but, whereas, Rothko
moved away from representing the natural world,
Hubschmitt has reinvested his landscapes with
organic forms more closely linked to nature.
The landscapes rarely represent real locations
and are more often assembled piecemeal from
small samples of famous paintings or close-up
photographs of such diverse textures as carpet,
plaster wall surfaces, wood grain, popcorn or
wicker baskets. These sampled textures are built
up and layered with new colors and, after weeks
of experimentation, the complexity, patina and,
what Hubschmitt calls a “chordal harmony” in the
composition, emerges. The full range of artists that
he draws inspiration from is widely varied and may
include brush strokes from Windslow Homer or
Vincent Van Gogh, or elements from such sources
as the art of Odillon Redon, Donatello, Rembrandt,
classical Roman and Greek statuary, medieval
icons, Degas, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and the
photographer Eadweard Muybridge. A solemn and
majestic quality pervades many of these pieces as
Hubschmitt approaches the work of these artists
with a deep and abiding respect for what they have
wrought. These works are not, however, simply
homages to great masters of art; Hubschmitt takes
only enough of any one work to start his dialog
with that artist, and from that kernel he begins to
dramatically manipulate the forms, introducing one
artist’s work to another, and continually working in
his own ideas and emotions to make sure he holds
up his side of the conversation.
Hubschmitt’s images owe most of their inspiration
from Renaissance, Baroque and modern painting
styles, but there remains a great affinity in his work
for some of the underlying qualities of Chinese
literati painting. Hubschmitt participated in a NEH
Summer Study on the art of Imperial China in
1993, and in the past four years, while on break
from his teaching at EIU, he has lived sporadically
in Shandong Province in China with his family.
Chinese culture and art holds a great fascination
for him, and it informs some of the iconography,
and the frequent use of atmospheric perspective,
but more significantly it is revealed in his artistic
sensibilities where he demonstrates a sympathy
for the Chinese literati notion wen, nature’s
underlying patterns. The organic qualities that
emerge in Hubschmitt’s digital paintings do not
describe actual places, but just as literati painters
would study a single rock to paint a mountain,
Hubschmitt’s landscapes convey aspects of
several places drawn from memory. This allows the
digital landscape paintings to embody a subjective
space that simultaneously represents a personal
response to the cornfields of Charleston, the sea
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Muybridge Series: Shadow Boxer, 2002
coast of New England, and the Nile River. Just
as with Chinese literati landscape painting, these
spaces are more akin to self-portraits, revealing
more about painters’ understanding of themselves
inside a world than a record of an actual place and
time outside.
In Hubschmitt’s portraits, the figures are suffused
with colors, patterns and textures to merge with
the background; just as his landscapes evolve
toward becoming portraits, the portraits evolve
toward becoming landscapes. By unleashing the
expressive force of color and texture, Hubschmitt’s
figures gain drama in a similar manner to Degas
or Toulouse-Lautrec—after the designs of the
Japanese ukiyo-e prints—where the bodies
present the seemingly arbitrary gestures of
everyday activity, yet are framed within a vibrant
and complementary world. There is a recurring
ambiguity in the portraits between what seems to
be, at one level, a casual snapshot, while on the
other hand, the density of the rendering bends
the image toward becoming an icon suffused with
textures and colors that flatten out into a timeless
tableau. Hubschmitt regularly engages the women
in his family as subjects for portraiture and there
is a tacit understanding of that relationship in the
photograph. “In many cases, the model knows she
is being watched,” Hubschmitt explains, “but she
chooses not to directly acknowledge it, perhaps
revealing something of her own self-image.”
Revealing the ravages of history frames the
themes of many of Hubschmitt’s digital paintings.
The heightened beauty and vitality that he has
given to decaying artifacts and fossils is a way
he affirms and reanimates the past. Most of the
paintings posses a distinctive aged patina that
obscures and dissolves the forms into one other.
The patina speaks to the accumulated history
and establishes the objects as belonging in time.
This is especially evident in the intense confusion
of shapes and colors Hubschmitt brings to the
classical Greek sculpture of the Laocoön and his
sons. He made this piece in 2004 while caring for
his father who suffered for many years from the
debilitating condition of Alzheimer’s disease. At the
time, myth about the fate of Laocoön and his sons
seemed an apt metaphor for contending with his
father’s condition and the cruel, unfair and tragic
aspects of life. Echoes of the powerful vitality of
the sculpture can be seen in Hubschmitt’s digital
painting straining against the decay of time, but it
is the beauty of the decay rather than the heroic
glory of the figures that is immortalized here.
The ordinary laborers that occupy Muybridge’s
photographic experiments in human locomotion
were employed to document the quotidian
ways humans moved about. Their names were
unrecorded, but their actions, parsed out in
measured increments, were no less significant for
their day than unraveling the genetic code is today.
In both we find a new definition for what it means
to be human, which forces us to take into account
our assumptions and prejudices, and realign our
understanding of what constitutes the common
stock of our shared humanity. Muybridges’
work was originally presented in an unflattering
academic manner to focus on the quantifiable
aspects of motion, but in Hubschmitt’s digital
metamorphosis, the latent beauty of these figures
emerges and enters into a dialog with our shared
artistic traditions.
Robert Petersen
About the Artist

William Hubschmitt has a B.A. in art history and studio art from Eisenhower College
of Rochester Institute of Technology, Seneca Falls, N.Y., and a M.A. and Ph.D. in art
history from SUNY Binghamton, N.Y. He is currently an associate professor of art
history and digital art at Eastern Illinois University. Prior to joining EIU’s faculty in
1996, he was on the faculty at the State University of New York-Oneonta from 1982 to
1996. Hubschmitt has taught art history and digital art and served as art department
chair at both SUNY Oneonta and EIU. His art has been exhibited at various venues
including: Derryberry Gallery, Tennessee Tech University (Cookeville, TN); Lawton
Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay; and The Halpert Biennial National Juried
Visual Art Competition and Exhibition, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Appalachian
State University (Boone, NC).

http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~wehubschmitt/

Roman Torso Capitoline Museum, Rome, 2000

About the Curator
Robert Petersen holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii
at Manoa, his M.A. from Brown University, and a B.A. from
the University of California at Santa Cruz. Petersen was a
Fulbright Scholar to Indonesia in 1988, and he joined the EIU
faculty in 1998. Current areas of research include graphic
novels and comic book art, and he has a book on the history
of graphic narratives art due out from Greenwood Press in
the spring of 2011.
This exhibition is presented in cooperation with the EIU Art
Department. Tarble Arts Center programs are funded by
Tarble Arts Center membership contributions and by the
Tarble Arts Center Endowment of the EIU Foundation.
depar t m e nt o f a r t
61920-3099
CHARLESTON IL
PERMIT NO 24
PAID
US POSTAGE
ORGANIZATION
NON-PROFIT
William Hubschmitt: A Retrospective Exhibition
August 21 – September 25, 2010
Main Galleries and eGallery
Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University
Exhibition Reception and Curator’s Remarks:
7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 28, Atrium
The Tarble Arts Center is located at 2010 Ninth Street on the
campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois.
Open Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.
to 4 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday; closed Mondays
and holidays. Free admission. For information: tarble@eiu.edu,
217-581-ARTS (-2787), www.eiu.edu/~tarble.
Cover image: Landscape with Golden Waves, 2003
Graphic Design: Ryan Boske-Cox, EIU University Marketing
and Communications
© 2010 Eastern Illinois University Board of Trustees for the
Tarble Arts Center; images used with the permission of the
artist.
Charleston, IL 61920-3099
600 Lincoln Avenue
Eastern Illinois University
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