Detail from a large oil painting.
Bill Bateman ~story and photos by Ryan Stacy
S
ome things found in Brown County—a waterfall in one of our many parks, lunch at your favorite local spot, the sturdy craftsmanship of our historic buildings—are uncomplicated, direct, and immediate in their appeal. There’s also a lot here that’s subtle and understated in its beauty, like snow seen falling silently onto the boughs of the trees, or the sense of history and tradition that persists here despite our ever-forward march further into the twenty-first century. And then there’s Nashville abstract artist Bill Bateman. Working out of a private studio downtown, Bateman is neither uncomplicated nor traditional in his approach to his art. Freed from the restrictions of representational painting, he’s driven purely by
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imagination, and if that puts him out of step with some of his peers, he’s fine with that. Bateman’s paintings, many featuring interlocking shapes that sprawl across the canvas in vivid colors, are anything but simple and conventional. Where many painters, for example, eschew the use of too many colors in a piece, preferring instead to work within a more limited range of hues and values, for Bateman it’s the more the merrier. Bold colors across the spectrum butt up against each other in his work, with little regard for how they’re “supposed to” fit together (or, it appears, for the cost of paint: like his imagination, his canvases are extra-large). But there’s a certain subtlety to Bateman’s paintings too, if you take the time to notice what’s going on among the visual chaos of his compositions. A slight threedimensional quality, for example, is achieved in his rendering of the surfaces and edges of his otherwise
