After a four-year exhibition hiatus, William Pierson’s show of new photographic work presents an artist at the height of his creative powers. His show, Diary of an Artist, at Eureka’s Piante gallery, displays the results of his ongoing contemplative cataloging of moment, emotion, and
environment. Pierson’s new photographs retain the themes and energy his work has demonstrated for years. The new pictures are immediately recognizable as William Pierson photographs (silhouetted trees, atmospheric skies, meditative horizons, seascapes, and time-lapsed celestial views abound) but there are some subtle changes, too.

One notable difference in Diary of an Artist involves Pierson’s relationship with abstraction.
Over the last decade, Pierson’s shows have included a number of photographs that could
arguably function as abstractions. However, in the past there was usually enough visual
information to allow the viewer to know what natural form Pierson had photographed. This is no
longer the case. Diary of an Artist includes several fully realized, unapologetic abstractions. With
pieces like Homage to Mark Tobey and Lunar Eclipse in Passing, Pierson seems to be
announcing his new relationship with the abstract. While his titles still often reveal the subject
matter from which these abstractions were realized, the information is wholly unnecessary to
experience the image’s impact. Another piece, Horizon Line Binding Two Elements, reads like a
kind of cheerful Rothko. In a sense, this title describes Pierson’s process and aesthetic: the
binding of the natural world and the artist’s metaphysical sense of self.

Another difference in Pierson’s new exhibition is the way pieces are titled and displayed. In
addition to titles, each piece includes a date, location, time of initial exposure, and number. The
photographs are displayed chronologically. While the passage of time has always been an
important element in Pierson’s work, (the movement of stars across the night sky, seasonal
changes, the subtle, second by second variation of light and shadow) now there’s a new temporal
connection between subject and artist. Viewing the work in the context of a visual diary, the
regular recording of visual information over time, we experience the artist moving through time
while simultaneously documenting moments in time. Pierson captures moments when his
internal, emotional experience of the instant becomes manifest in the external, natural world.

Pierson has said that he has always been drawn to symmetry, and his compositions have
historically demonstrated an innate sense of balance. In this new body of work, Pierson’s desire
for symmetry is again on display but not without an interesting contradiction. In some of his
most symmetrical pieces he has gone to great lengths to interrupt the sense of balance. Using
time-lapse techniques, Pierson turns celestial bodies into unbroken swaths of light that move diagonally, usually from left to right, across the top portion of the photograph. The addition of
these asymmetrical moments amid the expected symmetry are surprising and bring to the
pictures an added element of tension that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Often these moments are the
sole appearances of intense light or color, a sharp contrast with Pierson’s typically subdued
palette, drawing additional attention to the balance-tipping swaths.

Three pieces in particular exemplify this interruption: From the Heavens, Completion, and
Horizon Line at Midnight. In these photographs, reflecting light breaks dark water into three
distinct and balanced zones. In the foreground of two, the flora is compositionally balanced near
the bottom of the image. But at the top of each picture, nature’s balance is interrupted by some
celestial unknown: the familiarity and balance of the natural world upstaged, interrupted by the
metaphysical. Here again we can see the melding of Pierson’s two principle creative inspirations:
the metaphysical and the natural.

My favorite way of working photographically is when I don’t know what the outcome is going to
be. The best ones are gifts.
–William Pierson

Pierson has often said that he doesn’t search out subjects for his photographs but rather captures
them when they present themselves. This belies the diligence and awareness necessary to work
in this manner. The diary format (the artist moving through place and time) heightens the fact
that Pierson is constantly putting himself in position, making himself available, to record the
moments that trigger him to create. While an atmospheric sunset might move an artist to want to
paint a picture or a poet to pen a poem, Pierson chronicles the inspiration itself and his
emotional/aesthetic connection to it. It is a subtle but significant difference: an artist being
moved by a sunset and deciding to work with that subject matter or an artist being moved by a
sunset and finding a way to capture that sunset in that moment. The instants that move Pierson to
action are moments of recognition: seeing something of himself mirrored in the landscape. It is
in these moments of communion between his internal, emotional landscape and his external
environment that a William Pierson photograph is created.