W.C. HEMMING: "ANCIENT VISIONS, MYTHOLOGIES AND NIGHTMARES"
Exhibition -- July 2017
Columbus State Library
W.C. Hemming standing in front of "Homage to Chuck Berry" on Columbus State Library's 2nd floor.
Photographer: Nathan Gjerstad, 2017
What do you see in my art? My art is a tapestry of dreamscapes of images stored in the vault of my mind from youth and over the years. When I was young I was very inward as a child and an outsider looking in.
I was very poor but liked to read. The fiction took me to strange lands, strange worlds, and gave me an appreciation of history. In reading history I found heroes and villains. It taught me to respect icons of heroic ages. Through history I saw great triumphs and conquests and mistakes and failures. The important thing is that I saw images of different cultures. It gave me an appreciation of different societies.
When I was small there was nothing more fun than reading Science Fiction where James Blish or Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein would create unknown worlds where the green bug-eyed monsters filled you with danger and dread.
Images of advanced technological futures and missions to the stars and beyond. Later, when I read the grim, dark dystopian futures of Orwell, Huxley, and J.G. Ballard the future didn't appear so rose-colored. I was prepared for no Utopian future.
My art is to set down in vibrant, shocking, vivid colors what has piled up in my brain for years. To express as best I can with paint icons, heroes, villains, and scenes of life people can relate to. I paint what I see and where I have been and places I'd like to be and people I'd like to know and people or creatures I'd stay away from. I love the beauty of nature and women. I enjoy the infinite variety of human emotion and expression. I paint my moods from comic to grim. I am an artist that takes down his time and the age he lives in. An artist has a duty to record his age. I take down seventy years of images in my mind and release them a little bit at a time to canvas.
W.C. HEMMING, artist b. 1946 --
William C. Hemming has exhibited in the Columbus State Library many times.
See his past exhibits linked below.
Past exhibits since 2012 may be found in our Gallery Exhibit Archives.
January - Robin Buser - The Stitcher's Art
February - Marvin Taylor
March - Nexus: Mother and Child - Kimberly Rhyan and son, Carter
April - Rocco Di Pietro and Romulo Vazquez
May - Gallery is Getting a Facelift
June - Albert Gray
July - William C. Hemming - Oil/Acrylic
August - Jessica Moore
September - Daryl Brown - Oils / Watercolors / Encaustic
October - Cecilia Roman - Oil / Acrylic
November - Gene Strickland - Student Digital Photography
December - Open
