So much of what we encounter in contemporary society is detached and viewed through a technological means. My work explores the possibilities of painting in this age and the new views and techniques enabled through the use of technology.

I began the Panopticon Series of paintings in the fall of 2005 examining the sociological and philosophical issues of surveillance. The title references Jeremy Bentham’s design proposal for a circular prison with the warden in a center watch tower; an archetype that underlies the ideas of Michel Foucault’s writings on the subject in his book Discipline and Punish.

This work led me to working with video as a general source for images. With the unique quality of a continuous time series, video provides the artist the ability to move through the series and isolate a single frame. I began working with close ups of faces as they provide a great deal of information and the slightest physical change can be visually dramatic.

The paintings are created using an elaborate software controlled proprietary technique I developed for accurately applying drops of paint. Each painting has almost 40,000 individually applied drips of paint.

-William Betts