The Brooklyn Rail · April 2016 · In Conversation
Bill Conlon with Barbara Rose
A focused artist-site presentation of the 2016 conversation between painter Bill Conlon and art historian Barbara Rose, centered on abstraction, pictorial tension, technology, memory, and the evolving space of painting.
The conversation was published on the occasion of Conlon’s large-scale painting Dream, installed in 2015 at Fordham University School of Law. Rose and Conlon move through the history of abstraction, the pressure and promise of pictorial space, and the way contemporary visual culture has altered how painters think about signs, icons, windows, and structure.
Rather than treating abstraction as a closed twentieth-century language, Conlon frames it as an active, still-unfolding field. The interview returns again and again to movement: not only movement inside a painting, but movement across memory, art history, technology, and the hand of the painter.
Selected works from the article
Dream, 2015
Acrylic on canvas, 10 × 13 feet. Photo by Peter Conlon. Courtesy Fordham University, Lincoln Center, New York.
String Theory, 2012
Acrylic on Arches 155-lb hot press paper mounted on board, 40 × 48 inches. Photo by Peter Conlon. Courtesy the artist.
Broome Street Boogie, 1977–88
Acrylic on canvas, 53 × 66 inches. Photo by Eric L. Nilsen. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Saratoga, 2014
Acrylic on Arches 156-lb hot press paper mounted on board, 40 × 48 inches. Photo by Peter Conlon.
Interview themes
Abstraction after the screen
Conlon connects contemporary abstraction to the way we now read visual information: icons, windows, systems, and interfaces layered into daily perception.
Pictorial tension
Rose repeatedly returns to tension as a value in painting: a force that keeps space active, contradictory, and alive rather than merely balanced.
Movement and memory
Conlon describes paintings as spaces that can seem fixed in the present yet continue to move in memory, through elliptical bands, shifting viewpoints, and gravitational centers.
The hand and tradition
The interview argues for skill, experience, and touch as essential to painting, while situating Conlon’s work inside a long conversation with Cubism, Minimalism, mural scale, and abstraction.
Featured work
Dream as a point of departure
The discussion begins with Conlon’s lifelong commitment to abstraction and expands outward through the painting Dream. Rose sees a charged alteration of space; Conlon responds by describing forms that behave like identities, windows, and systems capable of interacting with one another.
For a studio-site audience, the article offers more than a historical interview. It becomes a compact artist statement in dialogue form: a record of how Conlon thinks through scale, surface, tradition, visual culture, and the physical intelligence of the painter’s hand.