Bio:

Will Rothfuss is a realist and plein air artist, a collagist and painter of geometric abstraction, and an assemblage artist. He studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League of NYC, and abstraction, art history, and printmaking at Cornell University. His work and aesthetic have evolved over a 40+ year career. He has had numerous solo and group shows, and his work is in public and private collections.

Will has also worked extensively as a cabinetmaker and scenic designer. He currently maintains a full time art-making practice near Delaware Water Gap, PA.

Artist’s statement about current work:

After 4 decades of almost exclusively making abstract art , I returned to realism in the last few years. This current work consists of large paintings, detailed models, and an exhaustive photographic survey of Texas churches and the landscape they occupy.

In 2020-2021, during the Covid pandemic I “traveled” via Google across the entire state of Texas. What started as a search for painting subjects grew into a methodical search, county by county, for every church that Google could uncover. I went down to ground level via Google street view, and using the tools available in Google, “photographed” the most distinct ones with a screen save on a large high resolution monitor. I looked at more than 15,000 churches and ended up with several thousand images of the most unique examples. In the process, I recorded a cross section of vernacular church architecture, the landscape and weather of Texas, and by extension, a chronicle of the status of Christianity in American life.

Going back to revisit some sites, I realized that Google has already and is continuously retaking the street view panoramas. Within two years, several of the churches I have painted or modeled are already dramatically changed or gone entirely. This gives the project the additional dimension of an historical record.