Bill Claps is a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in New York City known for work exploring universal cultural roots and shared elements across traditions, referencing art history, language, digital code, and appropriated imagery. His practice spans multiple disciplines and drawing from diverse sources including Asian landscape painting, expressionism, and contemporary art.
Claps's Natural Abstractions series emerged from his desire to capture the ephemeral quality of light in the natural world. He sources photographs from landscapes across China, Japan, the Cuban rainforest, and mountains throughout Europe and Asia, then finishes each work through his signature mixed media technique: painting onto the surface followed by a unique gold foil process refined over fifteen years. This process allows works to reveal new textures and nuances that transform in response to surrounding light conditions, emphasizing impermanence and constant transformation inspired by traditional Chinese and Japanese landscape painting.
Claps studied painting and art history at Harvard University, the Art Students League in New York, and in Florence, Italy, and studied filmmaking at New York University. His works are held in private and public collections internationally, including Today Art Museum (Beijing), MOMA Tbilisi, Frisk Art Museum (Nashville), and museums in Rome, Washington DC, and Saudi Arabia.
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