William Schumann

William Schumann is an intuitive, expressive acrylic painter using a process he refers to as “roundabout”. He is drawn to making big stylistic shifts between paintings as he experiments with relationships between color, pattern, and movement. Many of his ideas come to him as he is painting and asking himself, “What if I took this small idea or variation and applied it to an entirely separate artwork?” Through this process, he is continuously creating new ideas for expression and simultaneously reevaluating his established work as a point of new experimentation. Most of the pieces in this show were created within three months which is revealing of his roundabout evolutionary process as a painter: even as he develops bodies of distinctive works, it is only through indirect pathways of artistic expression that he reaches an intended destination.



William Schumann was born and has lived in North Carolina for most of his life. His life was also shaped by experiences while living in the American Southeast and Northeast, as well as in Belgium, Thailand, and Wales. He started painting in the 1990s but dedicated more time to his practice during the Covid pandemic. A lot of his work finds inspiration from the continuous growth and renewal of nature, which he explores through intuitive patterns and unexpected colors. His goal is to express the joyous vitality he sees in the world, which is also to recognize its frailty. Whether figurative or abstract, his paintings typically saturate the canvas in layers of color distributed through hundreds or thousands of brushstrokes, which he enjoys exploring on larger scales. His hope is that the energy in his paintings invites viewers to reflect on the inspirations of hope and possibility that shape their own lives