Artist William A. Newman

The effect is as beautiful as it is unsettling. The figure in Bill/Cock at first seems like a fancy chicken in a casual shirt, until one notices a still-human ear emerging from the bird's comb. In Cock/Bill the man seems to have been swallowed by the chicken, from whose underside Newman's self-satisfied grin emerges. In Bill/Sheep, two human eyes glare out of a smirking wooly sheep's head with an expression of sinister resignation. Like a horro-movie monster, Newman has stopped being totally human, and has resigned himself to giving up the fallacy of total individuality.

Painted with the splendid clarity of color found in high-contrast photography and a chilling attention to representational detail, these images seem admissible evidence of the classical idea of metamorphosis while also being powerful proof of the complex threads that create identity. Seen as a single self-portrait documenting his relationships, Newman's work literally illustrates how every facet of our identity is molded from features borrowed from those close to us. We are more comfortable realizing that we can trace our physical features through family than knowing we inherited those little personality quirks that we see as particularly "ours." But as Newman shows, none of us is totally original. We are only honestly de-picted when shown to be composites.

Pop/Pop, 2000. Oil on Wood, 19.5"x 19.5". Courtesy of David Adamson Gallery.

Ana Honigman is an art critic living in New York.

William Newman – David Adamson Gallery, Washington, D.C.

(New | Art Examiner) March 2001

Ana Honigman

William Newman's show Cracked 2000 is a self-portrait comprising 26 oil paintings, two videos, ten mixed-media boxes, and one enlarged digital image printed on canvas. Newman traces his identity through his family; this seems more honest than most conventional practices of self-portraiture by virtue of its awareness that we all only exist in context with one another. Taken out of this context we are either forgotten or mythologized. Only in light of our past selves and those of our ancestors, our residual insecurities form confronting that past, and the cultural influences surrounding us do our identities reconizably emerge.

Using a computer, Newman merges images of his own face with the faces of his loved ones. From these digital metamorphoses, he paints stills of the composite faces and edits them together into videos where the slow morphing of features is set to the children's song "Old MacDonald." He also uses select images to decorate glass and wood boxes, before filling the boxes with playful evocative trinkets such as plastic sunglasses and marbles. Viewers are invited to play with these objects like so many snow-globe homages.

Unlike Ovid's Metamorphosis, there is no biological snobbery in Newman's work, where male and female faces mix as easily as animal and human. An example of this intraspecies demoracy is Pop/Pop, in which Newman's beloved French bulldog is transformed into a hardboiled Dashell Hammer-type character thanks to the addition of the artist's grandfather's hat and traces of the elder man's features. Just like William Wegman's Weimeraners, this image illustrates the truism that familial ties arise out of shared affection and history, not just genetics.

In the "EIEIO" series of paintings, Newman portays his own transformation into animals that he has photographed on his farther's farm. Like a werewolf comfortably shedding his skin Newman morphs into the animals, which act as his father's surrogates.