BioPortfolio

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My work has been shown at universities, art centers, museums and galleries throughout the country. A frequent speaker and lecturer, I recently spoke at the
American Visionary Art Museum for the Johns Hopkins University Brain Science Institute’s program The Science of the Arts. Following this, I co-created four
evening programs in collaboration with the University of Colorado Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary
Art called Your Brain on Art. These sessions explored creativity, improvisation, visual perception and aesthetics
Left – Thea 3, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Destiny 7, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas

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Recent exhibitions
2015 Governors Art Show, Loveland Museum. Loveland, CO
Art Students League of Denver, juried by Christoph Heinrich of the Denver Art Museum
2014 Florida State University Museum of Fine Art, Tallahassee, FL
Governors Art Show, Loveland Museum, Loveland, CO
New York Hall of Science, Science Inspires Art
Knoll Gallery, Best of Denver Santa Fe Art District
Seven State Biennial, Goddard Art Center, juried by Mark White of the Fred Jones Museum of Art-University of Oklahoma
2013 Stephen F. Austin State University, “Texas National”, juried by Peter Selz past MOMA and UC Berkeley Art Museum (awarded 3rd Place)
Space Gallery, Denver, CO, one-person exhibition
Firehouse Art Center, Longmont, CO, one-person exhibition
Knoll Gallery, Best of Denver Santa Fe Art District (awarded Best of Show)
Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA, juried by George T.M. Shackelford of the Kimbell Art Museum
San Joaquin Delta College, Stockton, CA, juried by Rene de Guzman of the Oakland Museum of California
Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ - Studio Montclair, juried by Helaine Posner - Neuberger Museum of Art
Arvada Center, “Art of the State”, juried by Collin Parson - Arvada Center and Dean Sobel - Clyfford Still Museum
2012 Barrett Art Center, “New Directions”, juried by Susan Cross of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemp. Art (awarded 2nd Place)
b.j.spoke gallery, “Expo 31”, juried by Margot Norton of the New Museum
2011 Space Gallery, Denver, CO, one-person exhibition
Nassau Community College, juried by Samantha Rippner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (awarded Merit Award)
The Visual Art Center of New Jersey, juried by Joan Young of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum
The Museum of the Living Artist, juried by Roxana Velasquez of the San Diego Museum of Art
2010 Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO, one-person exhibition
Santa Cruz Art League, juried by George Rivera of the Triton Museum of Art
Denver International Airport – Denver Council for the Arts
Denver International Airport – 33 Ideas
Colorado State Capital –Denver Council for the Arts
Denver Botanic Gardens – Contemporary Response to Henry Moore
Metropolitan State University Center For Visual Art, Denver, CO
Space Gallery, Denver, CO, one-person exhibition
Old Courthouse Art Center, Woodstock IL, juror, G, Hertzlieb Bauer Museum of Art (Awarded 2nd place)

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One-person exhibitions
2015 Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta GA (upcoming)
2013 Space Gallery, Denver CO
Firehouse Art Center, Longmont CO
2011 Space Gallery, Denver CO
2010 Space Gallery Denver CO
Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder CO
2008 Gallery St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
Gallery Porto 34, St. Barth FWI
Exhibitrek – The Gallery, Boulder CO
2006 Exhibitrek – The Gallery, Boulder CO
Neo Art Gallery, Denver CO
Other group exhibitions (not included on previous page)
2015 Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta. GA
Gallery St Thomas, Virgin Islands
2014 Dairy Center for the Arts. Boulder, CO
Space Gallery, Denver, CO
2012 Space Gallery, Denver, CO
2011 Lana Santorelli Gallery, Chelsea NYC, NY
2010 Lana Santorelli Gallery, Chelsea NYC, NY
2009 Rembrandt Yard Art Gallery, Boulder CO
2007 Art Expo, New York NY
2006 Gallery St Thomas, Virgin Islands
2005 Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, New York NY
Beau Art Festival, Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables FL
Safety Zone International Exhibition, Virgin Islands
Left – Priscila 15, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Media Coverage
2015 NPR Science Friday Web – interview
Reality Serum Magazine - interview
2014 Milano Art Expo – interview
SciArt in America - review
Cover – Denver ArtScape Gallery Directory
Voice of R – International Youth Magazine – feature article
2013 Boulder Daily Camera/Times-Call, Colorado Daily – feature article
ColectiveArtsInk – Episode 2 podcast
Westword - review
2012 Invisble Museum – article
2011 Westword – review
2010 Caribbean Art World Magazine – feature article
Boulder Daily Camera – feature article
2090 American Contemporary Art Magazine – feature article
2006 Destination US Virgin Islands Magazine – feature article
Events and presentations
2014 Dairy Art Center/Sterling Rice Group Artful Chef - artist presenter
2013 Front Range Community College – guest artist lecture
2012 Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art – presenter
2011 Boulder Museum of Contemp. Art – co-creator/host of “Your Brain on Art”
2010 Johns Hopkins Univ., Amer. Visionary Art Museum, Thought Leader presenter
2008 Culture Haus at Space Gallery – featured exhibit and presentation
St. Barth International Book Festival – featured artist
2007 Colorado Art Ranch, Durango, CO - workshop presenter
Denver Art Museum, Denver CO - untitled #5 program presenter

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Ideas, methods and techniques
Can I turn paint and marks into an image that somehow feels real or gives us a sense of reality – essential
reality? Can I make an abstracted image feel like a very real person?
Rather than mimic the world, can I illuminate a world beyond mere illusion? Can I actually cause you to move
beyond interpreting my paintings as illusions of reality and instead cause you to perceive and experience reality?
To truly experience this body of work you must be willing to take part in a subjective narrative of your own
making. My portraits are informed by my interest in the visual brain and ideas of the seminal cubists. With an
ambiguous expression and uncertain context, I hope to provoke viewers into completing my portraits with their
own mental image, narrative and emotion - to turn inward to create a subjective reality.
We are attracted to faces – it is our nature. Eyes dominate and hold our interest. I create elevated intimacy via
shared gaze. I use metallic, iridescent and interference acrylic paint that changes with lighting and view angle. I
often paint multi-views or differing facial plains and features that are slightly out of alignment. I frequently paint slightly different expressions for each side
of the face. Witnessing these small changes might make these images appear more real as if time, half remembered memories, after images and prior
experiences were affecting our perception.
If I engage you with eyes then I can also start to do other things peripherally with line and color. I can color outside of the lines and your mind will resolve
it. Vague and scribbled outlines and graphic vectors become part of a recognizable whole while a hint of “unreal” complimentary and equal value color
causes the eyes to seem life-like. I experiment with the amount and type of information required to evoke an image and to find those characteristics that
cause the viewer to emotionally respond to the portrait.
All of my paintings start with a live model and then I work from reference photographs. I use a limited pallet of acrylic paint. I vary the coverage, spraying
varnish between layers and then scrubbing, scraping, scratching or sanding the surface while applying a variety of marks – strokes, dots and other
adjustments.
These paintings tend to be layers of fresh starts. I believe I might have a finished face one day but soon I brush, flow or spill paint all over the surface,
leaving traces - a template to guide the next iteration. In the end I am attempting to facilitate ever-shifting emotional experiences through the use of changing
and alternate points of view, engaging gaze, uncertain context, elusive emotion and naturalistic cues.
William Stoehr 303-638-2868 bill@stoehr.us www.stoehr.us William Stoehr Art

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Left – Zoe 1, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Caitlin 1, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – No More Words 2, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – No More Words 1, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – Laine 5, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Jacqueline 1, 60x44 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – Destiny 15, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Emma 1, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – Priscila 14, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Right – Laine 10, 60x44 inch acrylic on canvas

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Right – Sarah 4, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Right – Destiny 16, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Right – Myriah 1, 60x44 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – No More Words 4, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas

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Right – No More Words 3, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – Jacqueline 7, 48x36 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Thea 4, 60x44 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – Rheanna 2 , 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Priscila 13 , 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas

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Left – Heather 1, 80x60 inch acrylic on canvas
Right – Thea 5, 60x44 inch acrylic on canvas

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Icons
An essay by Leanne Goebel, AIC – USA
William Stoehr’s paintings of women’s faces are Amazonian. The canvases on
view in ICONS at Space Gallery are seven feet tall. It’s as if the women are staring
into your soul with their large, basketball-sized eyes positioned at eye-level for the
average human viewer. Laine, Destiny and Priscila all come to life in metallic
acrylic paint, charcoal and varnish tapping into the way our brains perceive line,
shape, form, color and shadow. Stoehr’s method of application, adding thin layer
atop thin layer by pouring the paint and moving it around—aided by gravity, a
sponge or paper towels—is similar to the way traditional oil painters create with
layers of thin glaze painted on with a brush, building up the color and surface of
the paint. Stoehr uses concepts similar to those used by Rembrandt, yet with a
contemporary application utilizing a childlike intuition, his only art training what
he received in high school in the 1960s. What is at once evident in these works is
his veneration of strong women—warrior queens of unknown ethnicity, their
expressions multifaceted and packed with emotion, mysterious, ambiguous.
Stoehr’s ability to create works with open-ended meaning and the techniques he
utilizes to do so have intrigued Neuroesthetic researchers who are attempting to
map the brain activity that produces perception, emotion and creativity. The eyes
are intentionally prominent in a Stoehr painting—they actually follow the viewer.
The eyes seem realistic, yet they are created with scribbles and splashes of paint.

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The brain is able to process the visual cues and then complete the artist’s
suggestion as something realistic from recorded remembrance—the brain
completes the picture from a stockpile of images stored in memory.
Because of this, each painting then is unique based upon the individual
mental recall of the viewer.
Not long ago a Harvard researcher, Margaret Livingston approached the
artist. In the broader field of neuroesthetics, Livingstone is focused on the
physiological processing of visual information. She wanted to know if he
was intentionally using equal value complementary colors and placing them
together. If he understood that it was the same technique Claude Monet
used to create movement. If it was not a conscious, rational decision, then
she wanted to know how he stumbled upon it. His answer? Stoehr said he
experimented and it looked good, he liked it, so he kept doing it.
“Vision is information processing. Artists make use of the ways the brain
extracts information,” Livingstone said in her Penny W. Stamps
distinguished visitors series lecture at the University of Michigan School of
Art & Design.
Semir Zeki, a professor of Neuroesthetics at the University College of
London, theorizes that artists unconsciously use techniques to create visual
art to explore how the brain works.
"...The artist is in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials and
capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations
can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural
terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach,” Zeki said in
Statement on Neuroesthetics.

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Stoehr does make use of how the brain extracts information and processes it in his art
making, but often this derives from a childlike sense of experimentation and intuition.
He is intrigued by ambiguity, defined by Neuroscience as the way our brain tries to instill
meaning into our world. It is not that things are indecipherable, but instead that there
are several meanings of equal validity providing an alternate certainty. When we see
something we may see it as ambiguous and our brain assigns emotion and meaning to it.
Influenced by research, Stoehr began exploring how to create something ambiguous in
his art.
“When something is ambiguous, it looks one-way in one moment and different in
another moment. When you project one emotion one day and another emotion the next
day the painting is more interesting and maybe more real to us,” Stoehr said.
Artists achieve ambiguity in art in many different ways. One of the most famous and
ambiguous paintings is Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa. Livingstone has a theory
about The Mona Lisa that Da Vinci harnessed how we visually perceive to drive viewers
into seeing the woman as an enigma, perplexed by her expression. If the viewer focuses
on the eyes of the The Mona Lisa her mouth is seen only through peripheral vision and in
peripheral vision the brain focuses on the shadows by her cheekbones, which cause her
lips to appear curved or smiling, but if the viewer focuses on the mouth, the brain
ignores the shadows on the cheeks, focuses on the line of the mouth and she appears
rather expressionless.

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“The brain processes the shading in a different area than it processes color and line,” Stoehr
explained. “Shading is more in our peripheral vision. In the eye, Cones are more perceptive to
color and line and Rods more perceptive to shading.” Experimenting with this led him to
explore other ways to convey ambiguous and ephemeral expressions. For instance, he
frequently gives each side of the face a slightly different expression—painting one expression in
the eyes and another on the mouth, one expression on the left side of the face and a different
expression on the right side. He also use iridescent paints that change depending upon the
intensity of lighting and the viewer’s point of view causing shifting patterns of light and slight
changes in expression. Stoehr thinks, “Witnessing these small changes might make these
images appear more real to us—more like we actually perceive.”
But it is a higher level of ambiguity that Stoehr is reaching for. He considers Johannes
Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring to be an almost perfect work. Vermeer used small
scale and local contrast to attract the eye, keep it moving around the canvas, expanding what it
takes in. “But there’s something more in that face,” Stoehr said. “There is the formal technique
that draws your eyes to the face. I see it, but it’s very ambiguous and it’s something else. I
haven’t put my finger on it yet, but he’s done it, and when I look at it I flip with different
meanings all the time. He’s created alternate scenarios that seem very real and that’s the
ambiguity that appeals to me.”

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After a trip to Florence, Italy he began adding metallic paints, outlining the women in gold
inspired by Byzantine religious iconography. Later he began working the gold paint into the
face, merging foreground and background. For a while he took all color out and now he is
adding it back in—a bluish green and purple here and there.
Stoehr has also been exploring concepts originally espoused by Cubism, but his focus is on
what the artists said they were trying to do rather than the flattening distortion of form with
lines and geometric shapes. The Cubist’s were asking how do we really see? How do we
visualize someone over time, knowing that our brain doesn’t treat that person as a snapshot?
How does an artist capture the theater in the mind and portray the unconscious version of
the person?
At its core, Stoehr hypothesizes that Cubism was about a way of seeing, rather than a way of
creating an abstract style. It was about creating the essential reality. A reality in which the
mind believes that what it is seeing is more real than a photograph because it captures the
quintessence of the subject and how we perceive and experience a person over time.

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“If their stated goal was essential reality, they didn’t hit it,” Stoehr said. However, sparked by
their desire to create essential reality, he began experiment with merging a more naturalistic
style with cubist-like multiple views, letting the viewer reprocess and complete the image. In
some works the face is created looking direct and in profile in an attempt to capture the
reality of how we experience a person over time, on good days and bad, when they are happy
or sad, tired or rested. By subtly combining different views of a face in one painting the
brain sees the subject portrayed, as it would experience a person over split seconds to weeks
or months or years.
Another concept evident in Stoehr’s work is Global versus Local Vision where what is seen
up close and what is seen from a distance is different. The most well known artist utilizing
this technique is Chuck Close who creates portraits from series’ of baseball cards or small
symbols created on a grid. In Close’s later works, the symbols in the small boxes processed
by local vision are sometimes painted using equal value complementary colors. In Stoehr’s
paintings, the local is not created on a grid, but in the area of a portrait’s forehead one will
find an abstract painting created from line and pigment.
As the viewer moves through this exhibition at Space Gallery, they will realize that some
portraits are hanging on walls while others are located on the floor, mounted on moveable
trolleys. Stoehr wants to change the relationship between the viewer and the art and enliven
the experience. The viewer is now able to alter the exhibit by moving the paintings around.
Through this action, he or she can consider how reorganizing the order and location of the
portraits affect each other and how they affect the viewer’s emotional reaction.

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As stated earlier, in spite of all of this scientific research, Stoehr happened upon
his technique intuitively and through continual exploration. Growing up in
Burlington, Wisconsin at 17 Stoehr thought he would be an artist, but instead his
education took him from a state school in northern Wisconsin to four years of
post-graduate education. He ended up as President of the Worldwide Mapping
Operation for National Geographic Society. Then one day, eight years ago, he
quit and decided to make art recalling his high school art classes and the artists
that inspired him in 1965—Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem de
Kooning.
When he picked up a brush he began making what he called “really crappy
stuff,” before getting a sense of who he was as an artist. Those initial paintings
were bright and colorful and within months he had two galleries selling the
works—one in the Virgin Islands and one in Denver. Then three years ago
another Denver dealer, Michael Burnett, suggested the he could draw and paint
faces really well. Stoehr then began focusing on the face. His paintings begin
with live models and he prefers working with the handful of women seen in
these portraits.
Stoehr continually challenges himself to dig deeper believing he is only at the
surface of where this subject might take him. How would Franz Kline paint a
portrait? What if I stop using brushes? How would de Kooning paint this part of
the forehead? No more red paint for a year. And he’s constantly going back and
adding to the works, never afraid of wrecking or ruining a work. He challenges
himself to paint the same women over and over again in different ways.
“When I’m in front of an easel with a brush or charcoal, I can tell you that this is
what I am meant to do,” Stoehr said.

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William Stoehr puts on a monumental show at Space Gallery
Michael Paglia Thursday, Mar 7 2013
Up front at Space Gallery is an impressive solo, William Stoehr: Icons, which
comprises 12 large portraits done in a wildly expressionist style. Stoehr blows up
women's faces to gigantic proportions using an action-painting approach, smearing
the pigments in rapidly laid-down strokes. Despite the abstract shapes of these
smears, Stoehr orchestrates them so that they carry out the recognizable features
of the individual faces.
In most, the sitter stares unblinkingly out at the viewer, making the experience all
but confrontational. And though each woman is different — there are three
women depicted — all of the paintings are unified stylistically and employ related
palettes. With all of them hung together, the show becomes a coherent installation
that's nothing short of monumental.

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Masks & Mirrors: New Work by William Stoehr
To truly experience William Stoehr's body of work in Masks and Mirrors, the viewer must be willing to
succumb to a frontier of emotion and take part in the journey. Upon approach, the mixed media canvases
of ethnically diverse women's faces close-up are arresting, even discomforting, as their gazes pierce the
room and confront the viewer. Each expression captures a single moment, but their eyes tell a story,
engaging the audience in a spectrum of emotional and intellectual responses. What the viewer sees,
(fragility, strength, resentment, resolve, loneliness, confidence, insecurity and perseverance) is often a
reflection of their own personal experience.
The honesty revealed in Stoehr's paintings is conveyed in a collision of contemporary realism and abstract
expressionism. Spontaneous rhythms of bold brushwork, drips and gestural marks fill the canvases edge to
edge, creating a tension that magnifies the energy with which he works. Layered washes of monotone
shades are slashed with intense color. And yet, Stoehr portrays the details of women's facial structure with
expert precision, emphasizing the eyes as the portals to their stories.
By Michael Paglia -Sep 1, 2011
William Stoehr: Masks & Mirrors is a major show of portraits installed in the large, double-height back gallery. Stoehr, who had worked for National
Geographic on its worldwide mapping project for most of his career, turned to painting full-time just a few years ago.
His works are nominally representational; in this case, he fills the canvases with enormous portraits of women's faces. However, his painterly techniques
originate in abstraction, and his lively surfaces are covered in scuffs, rub-outs, smears and runs of pigment. To create his pieces, Stoehr uses charcoal and
acrylic paint that he applies or removes with everything from brushes and sponges to sandpaper, steel wool, knives and rags. The resulting paintings are dark
and moody, with lots of black and metallic silver, which gives them an unusual luminosity, like moonlight, that's especially noticeable as they catch or absorb
the light, depending on the color. The women's faces — one per panel — are cropped close so that their hair, especially on the tops of their heads, is cut out,
making the features of their faces the dominant part of the pictures.
Apparently, Stoehr begins with a drawing that he then covers with paint. In a few, he goes in again with charcoal in order to clarify the details of the portraits.
Taken all together, the show is gorgeous and stopped me in my tracks as I entered the back gallery at Space.

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“Brain as Art” Exhibit At New York Hall Of Science Connects Art To Neuroscience To Provocative Effect
By Nekoro Gomes October 31, 2014
Not unlike the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the challenges inherent in artistic and scientific
endeavors are intimate ones that each practitioner can appreciate. Both the artist and scientist are driven
to visually interpret ideas, biological processes and other ephemera that are not terribly easy to express.
As artists have found new mediums for pushing the boundaries of expression, neuroscientists have
undergone a similar Renaissance, feverishly utilizing the latest technology to painstakingly record the
extent to which our brain shapes our very conception of self.
The brain becomes a muse for artistic expression in the Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. 16th
international juried exhibition The Brain as Art, on view at the New York Hall of Science.
Juried by two professionals from each field, the mission statement noted how Stephen Nowlin, the lead
art juror and working artist, and Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, the lead science juror and professor of neurology
at the University of Pennsylvania had little difficulty working together to select the 29 artists for the
exhibit despite the wide range of influences and mediums submitted.
The Brain as Art exhibit worked best when the processes in the artists’ approach sought to reflect the
reality of a body part that is so central to our existence and yet still so misunderstood.
Personally, the most truly captivating piece in the collection was Colorado-based artist William Stoehr’s
cubist-influenced Jacqueline 1. The painting of a gaunt, glassy-eyed face subverts Gestalt psychology—the
tendency of our brains to create a whole image from a partial object. The painting captured a rare
moment when our understanding of how the mind relates to the brain is most vulnerable. Staring into the expressive face of Jacqueline mimics the startling
moment your reflecting unexpectedly faces you in a mirror, giving you no choice but to wonder, “Am I really looking at the person my mind tells me I am?”

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invisible museum
William Stoehr at Space Gallery
Marina Graves September 11, 2012 5:42 pm
Sept, 2012, Denver — William Stoehr’s most recent exhibition at Space gallery in Denver was comprised of
14 portraits, none less than 4-foot x 3-foot, nor more than 7-foot x 4-foot 2-inches. Enormous portraits, all
of them as I remember of African American women shown frontally from the shoulders up. At this scale,
these portraits are obviously reminiscent of those by Chuck Close. They also share with Mr. Close the fact
that both are based on an accumulation of details. In Chuck Close’s case, these are often just a few small
discrete uniformly sized shapes arranged in matrixes or gridlines Mr. Stoehr’s work relies on accumulation of
details as well, but the details being accumulated seem far more random, even careless, rather than purposeful
– often not bearing any direct relationship, seemingly, to the perception of the whole. Instead each one of
them is a study in disguise, depth, and visual opacity masquerading as, or rather simultaneously occurring
within minute linear specificity. This makes it possible for the details to overwhelm the whole painting at the
same time that the whole painting emerges out of multilayered contexts of details, rather as if a number of
‘see-through’ land maps had been layered one on top of the other to create the final vision/version.
And in fact that is just how these pictures were made. Mr. Stoehr first draws an outline of the basic portrait in
charcoal and then he adds, layer after layer of paint in various mediums, using various kinds of implements
scrapers, sponges, etc. creating many paintings within the same large painting and many ways of interpreting
the lines and the spaces of various hues.
Up close, say within 12 inches we see points of bright green associated with delicate purple lines, but as we
retreat the small details seem to vanish completely. Then as we increase our distance from the imagery an
often grimacing, certainly restive face emerges from 1001 details and the imagery isn’t all inundated by details, details so powerful, they form completely
separate paintings in themselves. The whole presence of these paintings is a succession of stages as we walked backwards from the painting until a final focal
point is reached at, say, 10 feet and this is all accomplished with adroit, even virtuoso craftsmanship!
Mr. Stoehr is an assiduous student of recent developments in modern neurobiology, especially in regard to our visual processes, and is taking us along into the
barely charted waters of these processes and their unconscious neural hierarchies that largely determine the correlated what and how of that which we see and
know. Thus Mr. Stoehr is playing artfully with optical neuroscience. And, of course, artists have always done just that, only lacking in the explanatory scientific
knowledge. And the scientific key to this is that the brain’s neurons process shades and hues in different centers of neural activity from where it processes dots
and lines and horizons, yet almost instantaneously reintegrating them, which thereupon becomes the vision we see with.

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Do faces in Firehouse exhibit say more about the viewer or the viewed?
By Quentin Young Times-Call, Colorado Daily and Boulder Daily Camera
Boulder - You're never alone in the company of
William Stoehr's art.
He makes large paintings of women's faces that fill
the canvas and have an uncanny presence, as if
they're masks behind which living people lurk. Much
of the surface within his lines and contours, he
paints abstractly. But he faithfully molds the faces
and puts a glint in the eyes, and standing in a room
full of these paintings can leave the viewer feeling as
if he, not the portraits, is on display. The women
look straight out. Their gaze is direct. The look on
their faces is invariably serious, and they appear to be
in states of melancholy or accusation.
Then again, Stoehr might stop a person right there
and say, "No, that's just what your own mind brings
to my paintings." He paints the women, he says,
such that much is left to interpretation.
"None of these women have expressions," he said. "I want you to complete that expression."
Local viewers will get a chance to complete Stoehr's paintings when his solo show is on display Wednesday through Aug. 4 at the Firehouse Art Center.
The exhibition, "The Artist's Studio," will be set up to give visitors the feeling they're stepping into Stoehr's studio. His actual studio is located on the
ground floor of his home in west Boulder, and Jessica Kooiman, the center's executive director, said visiting it made a strong impression on her.
"It's such a great experience because you go in there and he gets all excited and starts showing you stuff . . . It's so powerful," she said. "We had this
idea to do an artist's studio and show what it's like to be in his studio."
Stoehr, in fact, plans to paint in the gallery periodically throughout the run of the show.

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Some of the works will be on wheels, and visitors will be allowed to move them, the way Stoehr might when he's in his studio. This will have the
liberating effect of breaking the invisible barrier that's typically erected between art and viewer in a gallery, but it also has an aesthetic function. Art,
particularly Stoehr's work, changes with changing location and light. Stoehr often uses metallic paint, which is especially sensitive to lighting variations.
His faces are made with subtle cubist qualities that imbue them with multiple appearances, depending on physical, as well as psychological point of
view.
Art theory plays a crucial role in Stoehr's work, and his works in the "Artist's Studio" are, to a great extent, an expression of his fascination with cubism.
Cubism -- the early 20th-century school made dominant by Picasso, Braque and others who packed multiple visual and temporal angles into a single
work -- gives Stoehr a way to better capture reality by representing, say, faces, as we really see them. When we look at someone's face, we filter that
image through emotional and visual context, he notes. It might be colored by the angle at which we saw it only several seconds ago, or by some
remembered slight or remark of praise that came from the person.
The cubist elements in Stoehr's work could be slight asymmetries or the suggestion of a third eye. Whereas the work of many early cubists were explicit
as mash-ups of various views, Stoehr takes a less apparent approach, and his images, apart from their almost invariably limited and dark palette, have a
more natural look.
"I'm taking it to a new stage," he said of his cubist pursuits. "I know that sounds grandiose. But it's great fun." his faces in the show belong to real
women. Many of them are models Stoehr met in coffee shops, and every one is from Boulder, he said. His paintings that are named for women, such as
"Destiny 15" or "Laine 5," bear the real name of the woman who modeled for the work.
For as much as Stoehr tries to strip his faces of context and expression and leave maximum space for viewers to color in the missing parts, his paintings
have a charge to them. They are in no way blank slates. They twinkle with energy.
"They just have this quality of, 'Pay attention to me,' " Kooiman said.
Stoehr ruminates at length about his art on his Facebook page, William Stoehr Art, and it was not a surprise to read something he wrote on May 29: " ...
At some point I have to confront that (my paintings) really are about me. I am terrified. I hate thinking about it and I always deny my own involvement
save for the art part. I say they are context-less yet maybe for me they are full of context."
You're never alone in the company of Stoehr's art. Stoehr is always there.

36
William Stoehr's art tickles the brain.
Where science meets art
By Aimee Heckel Boulder Daily Camera – November 14, 2010
William Stoehr is running a science experiment. But his lab doesn't have a microscope, petri dish or test tube. His equipment is a fist-sized hunk of charcoal, a
fat paintbrush, a bucket of red paint, a dish scrub and sandpaper. Stoehr is an artist. You might not know it from peeking into his Boulder studio, but Stoehr is
also fiddling with neuroscience – delving deep into the subconscious chambers of the brain, and building bridges between visual perception and emotional
response.
He points to one of his oversized charcoal face portraits. A little yellow in the eye here, paired
with some purple over there, and suddenly the eyes look realistic. They seem to move. Two men
recently said they felt judged by those eyes. People regularly burst into tears when they see
Stoehr's paintings, although they don't -- or can't -- say why. Creating art that evokes emotion is
all about experiments and happy accidents. Just like science, Stoehr says. In fact, despite their
seeming opposite sides of the spectrum a growing field called "neuro-aesthetics" believes that
science and art are different sides of the same coin, and inspecting both sides can lead to a more
comprehensive understanding of the human brain.
Artists like Stoehr have begun studying neuroscience as a map to enhance their artwork. And
scientists have begun more seriously considering visual art, music and architecture to glimpse
inside the head of not just the artists, but also the people who interact with the work. It's the
science of aesthetics and beauty. In other words, how the brain processes, responds to and
creates art. This collaboration could lead to an improvement in education and medicine down
the road, according to advocates, such as the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute. For
example, if you knew how to design a room in a way that triggered the brain to heal, it would
change the way we design hospitals.
The institute recently sponsored a conference called "The Science of the Arts." Among the
speakers: neuroscientists, researchers and a molecular biologist and Stoehr, the Boulder painter.
Artists have foretold-- on some intuitive level -- what neuroscientists are just now discovering,
the symposium suggested. Historically, artists have sought out to paint pictures of curvy women.
Later, neurologists discovered the brain has more receptors for curves, making humans pre-

37
programmed to prefer curves to straight lines. The brain is also set up to prefer line drawings of faces to realistic portrayals, and the eyes are drawn to the area
of the greatest contrast between the brightest bright and the darkest dark.
Stoehr didn't know any of this when he began painting six years ago, although these traits are fundamental of his artwork and could explain his quick pathway
to popularity. (Stoehr's artwork now hangs in a temporary exhibit at the Denver International Airport and soon will be in the State Capitol.)
"Scientists wanted to know how I knew to do it," Stoehr says. How did he use lines and luminance to trigger emotions? That would be the topic of his Johns
Hopkins presentation. The only catch? He didn't exactly know how.
Stoehr has never taken an art class. One day, he says he just decided to quit his job as the president of National Geographic's mapping group to pursue a
different path. His only artistic strategy: To make a lot of accidents.
Through trial and error, he says he discovered concepts that art schools teach, stuff like "equal luminance," and how to use "discordant color" to bring a
portrait to life. But Stoehr doesn't worry about the jargon, and he says he never paints to try to evoke a certain response. "I don't even think about it while I'm
painting. I just draw what I see," he says. "That's, in some way, the key: Disengaging the brain." It's kind of ironic from a neuro-aesthetics perspective: turning
off the brain to open up understanding of the brain.
Even the trademark of Stoehr's art -- splashes of red or orange paint across the charcoal faces -- is random. Sometimes he asks the subject to throw it. (All of
the women he paints are Boulderites, like a woman working at a coffee shop on Pearl Street.)
It's those red splotches that Jeremy Nathans says provokes an especially interesting neurological response. Nathan is no art critic. He's the professor of
molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins' School of Medicine. His interest in art centers on how the images are processed in the retina and brain,
and how we alter these images.
What comes in at every stage is altered," Nathans says. "It's not like we get a perfect movie of the outside world projected on a little screen inside our brain."
Our brains filter, distort and suppress different aspects of what we see. Think about eyewitness testimony in court. Witnesses will swear on their mother's
grave that that man was the perpetrator. But these accounts are highly unreliable, despite the certainty in their memory. "Many times, we think we have an
accurate perception of the world when, in fact, we have colored it, both literally and figuratively, with our expectations and experiences," Nathans says.
Understanding how a normal brain works can provide insight into how to rehabilitate brains after a stroke or with debilitating diseases, Nathans says.
Here's where art comes in. "Visual art taps into the brain circuits by, at some level, bypassing the analysis that we're doing when we look at a general scene,"
he says.

38
Think about how a painting or a song can stir up buried emotions that you suppress in your day-to-day life. A man looks at Stoehr's painting and says he feels
judged. Art can reach around the brain's filters and set off thoughts before you see them coming. A woman breaks into tears when she looks into the portrait's
eyes. She doesn't know why. But her brain is firing away in a way that fascinates scientists like Nathans.
Nathans says Stoehr's paintings tap into the mind on two different levels. Consciously, you see
the portrait. Subconsciously, the red sprays of paint create a mood. The painting stimulates two
different parts of the sensory system, he says. Plus, the haphazard red splotches catch your
attention because they are unexpected, Nathans says. A part of you feels like he has defaced his
own painting, and this creates tension. It's fascinating, Nathans says, from a purely scientific
point of view. "I think a lot of art is that way," he says. "You get inputs into your system, and
you can't put your finger on why you like it, but you do. Understanding art can help us
understand the subconscious part of the brain and the real way that we perceive the world.

39
2009 By Kelly Stone
William Stoehr left his career to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming an artist. In his previous career incarnation, Stoehr was president of National
Geographic Maps, the entity responsible for all things cartographical for the international magazine. Although gratifying on many levels. Stoehr yearned to
explore a different sort of terrain, the infinite territory of canvas and paint.
Speaking with him from his Boulder, Colorado studio, one gets the feeling Stoehr is in his element judging from the excitement with which he speaks about
his recent works. This interview finds him midway through his newest series. For many modern artists and explorers alike, this is the dreaded moment of
“what do I do next?”, a critical junction between a momentous start full
of ideas and fervent work and the gradual waning of drive and longing
for the next frontier. Surrounded by canvases many of which are on the
verge of the final brush-stroke, Stoehr finds opportunity for new
discoveries in the paint already applied and inspiration for the forms
not yet realized.
Stoehr’s aptitude in rendering the human figure is astounding, not
withstanding the fact that he has only been a “career artist” for four
years. The ability with which he coaxes the form from within the
canvas has earned Stoehr accolades from domestic and foreign
galleries.
Focusing on the elements of portraiture that interest him most, Stoehr
directed his attention to expressive qualities of the human face with
intense concentration on the subjects’ eyes. Stoehr details the model’s
features with precision, each planer variation expertly drafted with
dramatic shadows and highlights.
Stoehr’s models are ethnically diverse providing a comprehensive array
of varying bone structures and features. The selection of models
enhances the universality of the collection as a whole.

40
The monochromatic palette with which he initially renders the visage freezes the form in a dramatic likeness of the model while imbuing the canvas with an
almost sculptural reflection. Although the face is frozen in a sort of suspended reality, the subjects’ eyes are vibrant and engaging. Stoehr’s application of
dramatic sweeps of red across the canvas accentuates and abstracts certain details of his figure, enhancing the tension and movement of the subjects’ eyes.
With varying coverage of color, Stoehr amplifies the figure’s intensity and presence.
While drawn to the pragmatism of representational mark-making, Stoehr is enthralled by the freedom of intuitive abstract compositions. Stoehr describes the
first time he approached a detailed canvas with a red brush questioning, “Should I put the paint in certain places… or let the painting go?” A moment of
conflicted desire to control was met with his instinctive reaction to press the brush to the canvas; Stoehr standing on the precipice, decided to leap. With a
distinct portion of the journey relying on intuitive happenstance, has Stoehr experienced any missteps? He answers, yes, explaining a situation with one of his
first canvases, an over-energized brush stroke produced a foot-long gash across the surface of the painting. Aware but not overly conscious, Stoehr continues
to allow the brush the ability to create at will.
While some of his canvases are lightly touched with color, others integrate color intensely into the matrix of the composition. Stoehr juxtaposes translucent
washes of color with opaque brush-strokes varying the figure’s presence on the canvas.
In some portraits the color closely contours the facial features, pleasantly accentuating the form. In other portraits in this series, swaths of color seemingly
dissect the image, abruptly cropping and intensely abstracting the figure.
At the time of this interview, Stoehr is investigating new techniques of color application. Having recently read a biography on Francis Bacon, Stoehr is
interested in Bacon’s use of spray paint. Drawn to its immediacy, limitless intensity, and unpredictability, Bacon used spray paint and other unconventional
coloring tools as a distraction from intentional mark-making stating, “Half my painting activity is disrupting what I can do with ease.” With an unwavering
sense of adventure and a taste for the unknown, Stoehr picks up a spray can and charges forward

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