Bill Kane

About

Bill Kane is an American multi-media artist whose work intersects the boundaries of photography, painting, and printmaking in an effort to examine the idea of what an image is and can be. He lives and works in California, near San Francisco. Education Kane earned his B.A. in Education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1973, and his MA in Photography from San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, in 1978. He is a two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, once for Painting and once for Photography. Technique Since the late 1970s, Kane has continually experimented with different methods and materials as part of a wider exploration into the definition of image making. Photography and its fundamental elements have consistently informed this work. The Emanations series is an attempt to express the spiritual potential of the most essential aspect of photography: light. Each work in the series began its evolution as a scanned image of a Buddhist thangka—a spiritual painting of a Buddhist deity—which was then blurred and stretched until all that remained was a distilled image of color and form. These reduced images were then printed onto canvases, resulting in what Kane refers to as elemental “representations of the light bodies of the Buddhas.” Inspiration The inspiration for the Emanations series came from a chance encounter Kane had with a Buddhist monk, who told him that images of the Buddhas bestow blessings upon those who view them. Kane understood those blessings to be moments of tranquility, or peace of mind, similar to what a viewer might experience when encountering a work of abstract art by an artist such as Mark Rothko or James Turrell. This notion that an inanimate object could bestow such feelings upon a viewer resonated with Kane, who has long seen art as a starting point for larger perceptual experiences, and his photographs as only partial elements within larger visual works. Kane created his Emanations serie