William Betts

William Betts has made a reputation for himself as an artist using digital technology to produce paintings that are as exacting as they are compelling. Building on previous careers in the gas, real estate, and software industries, Betts planned his late entry into the art world with a keen sense for business, and sought success through the strategic melding of creative ingenuity and marketing. Although he went to art school in the early nineties, Betts’s official debut as a professional artist only dates back to 2003, but he went about his new venture with the determination and skill of an experienced entrepreneur sure of his talents.
Interested in what he terms the “elasticity” of digital images, which can be sliced or stretched without any loss of information—a discovery he made while playing around with digital technology in 1996—he set out to devise a system that would allow him to exploit that potential and translate it into painting. The solution was a computer-controlled industrial robot that moves up, down, and along rails attached to a table, and comes to a halt, following the artist’s commands. The machine is controlled by custom-made software that allows for minute manipulation of the process. Between adjusting the settings of the computer program, and monitoring the progress and quality of the paint application, it takes Betts about two weeks to complete a painting. Unlike other artists of his generation who have incorporated painting machines into their work to signal their critical or ironic engagement with the history of the medium and the role of the artist, Betts embraces the machine as the only tool that will produce the aesthetic and quantitative results he is after. It is an open secret kept where it belongs: in the studio. For his first series of work, Betts took one pixel’s worth of information from a photograph, broke it down into its individual color components, and translated them into vibrant compositions of crisp parallel lines of color. Continuing his experiment with lines in the Moire series, Betts layered sets of lines that differed in angle, spacing, and width into dazzling, shimmering patterns. For the Random Color Square series, he replaced lines with dots, but the resulting patterns are equally complex and visually confounding.
With his Surveillance and Traffic Cameras series, Betts entered different territory. Instead of condensing concrete information into retina-challenging abstract compositions, he reproduced imagery captured on surveillance cameras and traffic cams using dots that mimic the pixilated nature of his source images. Although less mysterious than the artist’s abstract compositions, they have one thing in common with the other series: an interest in what is ordinarily unseen, elements that Betts draws out for public consumption, be it the colorful reality and composition of a pixel or, in this case, a kind of surveillance imagery that is not commonly available. Betts avoids overt sensationalism—we don’t witness crimes or accidents. But the very mundanity of the scenes serves as a reminder that the promise of security offered by surveillance technology also comes at the price of privacy.

William Betts' new representational paintings, at the Peter Miller Gallery, show a satisfyingly tight union of the things depicted and the method of depiction.

The paintings are based on surveillance video images. Some were found, others staged. All are chilling in the way they suggest ominousness, even threat, without ever being specific. Nothing of consequence happens in any of them. Yet at this moment in American social history we are so primed to expect the worst that Betts' canny power of suggestion succeeds in tapping into a reservoir of negative feeling.

The method with which he has painted the images is, likewise, icy. Betts uses computer-controlled linear motion technology and a software system of his own design to apply, robotlike, tens of thousands of paint drips to underlying grids. Moreover, he employs colors to give the impression of black and white. The low-temperature results do not allow our emotions to become heated.

Two years ago, Betts created neutral stripe paintings derived from landscapes. Here he has raised the stakes considerably. These are paintings that speak simply and directly to how we live now.

William Betts: View from the Panopticon
Richard Levy Gallery
MAY 2 0 0 7 THE MAGAZINE | 5 3
Rinchen Lhamo

These six paintings, rendered in strictly regimented, mechanically applied acrylic dots of approximately 3/8” in diameter, inspire an immediate curiosity about the process involvedin their creation. A resident of Houston, William Betts obtained a license that allows him to view surveillance videotapes created by the city’s department of transportation. He spends hours pouring over the footage to select a frame that has sufficient tonal contrast and an arrangement of elements that will ultimately render an interesting picture. He then applies a software-controlled process he developed that assigns a specific color to each tone in the black and white video still. Spot by spot (totalling about 40,000 individually applied drops of paint), the picture is systematically reinterpreted into a cohesive, colored one. Each dot of color corresponds to an enlarged pixel within the frame. When looking at these paintings, distance enhances comprehension of the image. Always ambiguous and partial, with few specific visual clues other than a time-date stamp inscribed in an upper or lower corner, the paintings invite the viewer to infer whatever narrative he/she likes. Moreover, the colored dots become subsumed with distance: the dots vanish and the colors diminish, making the painting look like a grainy photograph. Implicit in Betts’s methodology of interpreting an image as a collection of dots is the idea that visioning isn’t a solid enterprise; it is incremental and disparate. This aspect of these paintings is more interesting than the sociological and philosophical implications of surveillance as a machinery of control in the twenty-first century. The artist has said that this series of paintings was inspired by the late -eighteenth -century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s concept of a Panopticon: a circular prison wherein each inmate would be seen but himself not see beyond the walls of his cell. He would always be the object of information, never a subject sharing in communication. In this show, “panopticon” is presumably a metaphor for modern society’s inclination to observe the anonymous individual through the policing function of a discreet surveillance system. But what is the aim of generalized surveillance mechanisms, after all? This anonymous, paper-tiger power is so distanced as to render it almost meaningless… which is the same way I felt about the supposed narratives that one might manufacture looking at these paintings. In the same way that an overhead shot in a movie will subtlety disempower someone, the aerial views of surveillance cameras inherently “vulnerize” the object of the camera’s gaze. But unlike in the pantopticon where the inmate knows he/she may be being observed at any given time, the power of modern surveillance methods is really only an assumed one, imputed by the rather clumsy attempt being made to partition human behavior. Gone is Bentham’s principle of the supreme importance of the viewed knowing that he/she is being viewed. I think of Jean Genet’s remarkable Un Chant d’Amour, made in 1950. Set in a prison, the film shows a warden who assumes the role of voyeur, peering through keyholes at prisoners pleasuring themselves, the latter totally aware of the onlooker’s own frustrated erotic longing to communicate. Either way: in the context of a fully functioning, post 9/11, ubiquitous surveillance system, or in the sordid yet intimate setting of a prison setting, where the surveillance is acutely felt by all (and manipulated), the mechanics of observation and its ability to penetrate into people’s behavior is, thankfully, questionable and unpredictable.

REVIEW
Chicago Tribune
Published March 10, 2006

By Alan G. Artner

Whenever new technology becomes available to art-making processes, a number of artists will use it to perform tasks formerly done by hand. William Betts' paintings at the Peter Miller Gallery provide a vivid example of the practice.

The artist shot digital photographs--generally landscapes--in several European countries. Then on his computer he worked his way across each photograph horizontally, extracting a slice of its color to the height of a single pixel. This thin strip of variegated color he then extended vertically, using a machine that he programmed to paint stripes.

The stripes precisely represent the colors in the photographs, though of course the landscapes have been abstracted. No trace of the artist's hand appears in any of the pictures. The only "personality" evident from the way the paint was set down is that of the machine, which produced uniform, slightly raised striations.

The paintings are as crisply decorative as can be. But Betts' process is more important than the objects it produced--and you would not know the process if you were not told. But everybody involved with contemporary art is used to that, and it also is generally accepted that things written or said by artists can contradict the physical objects they create. Betts' paintings fit into this world most beautifully.

William Betts sounds like any successful businessman with a start-up. He invented a "digitally controlled paint application process" that he uses to manufacture "high-end luxury products." Sales are strong, and he's continually refining his process, products and marketing strategy. He worries about his brand.

The thing is, Betts' business is art. And artists don't usually talk like that.

Betts — who's traded natural gas, sold real estate and marketed software — learned his approach from the business world. It's a startling contrast to the idealistic, impractical non-approach of most artists, but for Betts it's just common sense.

His paintings are just as surprising. He creates them not with a brush, but with a special computer-controlled painting machine. Described as products, they can sound like chilly technical exercises, knocked out with an eye toward making money. But Betts has the heart of an artist; the paintings are unreasonably complex, too carefully orchestrated to be sensible in a strictly business sense. Betts, whose art often concerns sharply drawn lines, inhabits a fuzzy gray area, a new-feeling space that lies somewhere between art, business and high-tech.

Tall and stringy, Betts moves with a restless intensity around the neat, white-walled studio atop his glass-and-metal house in the stylish West End. Touches of gray at his temples seem at odds with his rock 'n' roll uniform: blue jeans, white T-shirt, black sneakers.

He looks like a former rocker, and he is. Born in New York in the '60s, he submerged himself in the New York nightlife instead of going directly to college. He worked in galleries, he says, and lived "in a gross little walk-up." The scene's famous hedonism took its toll, and by 1984 the party was over.

According to Betts, drugs and clubbing were literally killing him. ''My family intervened and saved my life," he explains.

He escaped New York for Phoenix, to explore opportunities in the gas marketing industry, his grandfather's business. Newly deregulated, the field was wide-open. His partner, a high-school friend, bought the gas; Betts signed up industrial end users in California. They had some luck, and sold out to a bigger player a year and a half later.

Betts then took a job selling new homes in the desert, helping a California builder clean up a failed project. "It was hard-core sales," sighs Betts, but "until you have college, your options are limited."

With the homes sold and money saved, Betts finally got the education he yearned for, earning a B.A. in studio art from Arizona State University in 1991. Art was a natural choice. His father was an architect and art collector; his mother, a photographer. In Betts' high-powered family, he says, "there was always the impression that being an artist was no different than being an architect, a doctor, or a lawyer."

He and his sisters were driven to succeed. Kate, two years younger, is now the editor of Time Style&Design; Elizabeth, four years older, is art director at Us Weekly.

But it took William awhile to find his calling. In his senior year, driving through Oklahoma, Betts took a photograph many will recognize. "It was the most banal picture you can imagine," he says. "Edge of highway, yellow line, some scrub grass, field, horizon, blue sky. I painted it by hand. As I started playing with digital in '96, I found that there was an elasticity to these images. You could slice it and stretch it, and it was the same. It didn't change."

He carried that stretched landscape in his head for years as, out of college, he once again set his art aside for business.

His gas-marketing connections got him a job with Panhandle Eastern in Houston. When the company spun off a technology group as a software business, Betts went along. More time passed, and Betts changed companies and cities. In 2001 he was a software marketing executive in London.

"Business was taking its toll on me," he says. "It wasn't me. I felt like I was compromising myself." When his company was bought and reorganized, he took a severance package and decided to make a career in the art world.

His wife, Yvonne, worked for the same company. She stayed on, and together they transferred back to Houston.

Betts was determined to do his career right this time. "I'm lucky," he says, '"because all the mistakes I've made have been in other places and other times and in other fields."

Betts insisted that art pay its own way. He points to one of his medium-size paintings, priced at $4,800, on the studio wall: "There's no way, just looking at it purely on economics, that if I'm selling that painting for a thousand bucks that I'm going to make a living. So then what happens is you take another job, and that job starts to bleed away time, and the work suffers."

He experimented with his digitally stretched photos, seeking a paint-application technique as precise as the digital data he wanted to represent. He attached paintings to a rotating drum like a wood lathe, but the drums wobbled.

The turning point came when he invested $8,000 in a computer-controlled industrial robot. The machine looks like a large flat table with heavy steel rails along its sides. Another steel beam rides these rails, spanning the table's surface. The machine's head crawls along this beam on a cogged track, allowing Betts to place the head at very precise locations anywhere on the table.

All this is off-the-shelf equipment more often found in industry than in an artist's studio. Betts' baby, what he calls his ''secret sauce," is an attachment for the machine that makes very narrow, razor-sharp lines of acrylic enamel.

The last link in Betts' direct digital-image-to-painting technique is the custom-made software that controls the machine. Like a medieval master craftsman, Betts guards the details of his process. He hasn't patented them, and doesn't plan to. Secrecy, he figures, is better security.

The line paintings Betts creates with this set-up, representing a total investment around $20,000, are striking. Cascades of impossibly narrow stripes in vivid constellations of color seem to fluctuate forward and backward in space, with a tightly controlled energy that perfectly mirrors Betts' personality. They combine the precision of computer graphics with the physicality and intense color possible only with paint.

It's self-evident that the paintings are machine-made, as is the fact that they're painted. The contradiction arouses viewers' curiosity and consternation. Are they prints? Paintings? Sculptures? How did he do that?

He produces the paintings in sizes ranging from typing paper to mural, with prices from $1,000 to $8,000. Sometimes he makes them in editions — that is, a limited number of exact copies, something usually impossible for paintings. The very existence of Betts' work assaults a nest of assumptions about what paintings are supposed to be.

Good artists are often fanatics about their work, but Betts extends the same extreme, self-conscious control to his marketing strategy. He began by making 16 paintings. ''I realized that it was really important to have a full body of work," he says. ''Sixteen paintings seemed like a good number. It's not a complete slide set, but it's most of the sheet." He showed them to Meg Poissant, and in 2004 he had his first solo show at Poissant Gallery in Houston.

In an intense, nationwide marketing blitz, he contacted more than 100 galleries and netted himself four more shows. Contacts through art fairs got him two more. To produce the 60 paintings he needed for his six solo shows in 2005, he bought a faster machine.

Betts says his business plan is working. "So now I've got the galleries out there. I've got the throughput. I've got the process down, so I can cut back supply. I used to do a lot more editions. Now I've cut those off."

He shows in galleries elsewhere, but represents himself in Houston. "Part of the reason I don't have a gallery here is because I felt like I have to control my brand," he says. "I watch my Web traffic like a hawk. I can watch what images people react to. It's like putting a survey on every piece of art."

He's as open about his marketing techniques as he is secretive about his process. "It's not a manipulation; it's just managing," he says matter-of-factly. "What I'm doing is not rocket science. A real marketing person would come in here and just shred me."

As for the convergence of art and business, he quips, "I'm pretty comfortable leveraging the capitalist system."