For Over 50 Years, SC Artist William Buggel has shined on the Art Scene

By Jennifer Baker

South Carolina artist William Buggel has a career as long as your arm. Trained at USC in the 1960s, his work has been placed in dozens of exhibitions, garnered countless awards and honors, and been placed in the state museum. You would be hard pressed to find an artist more expert than Buggel: from knowing what works for him, to how a painting can take years or might require a very particular canvas.

Art aficionados will know his work very well, but everyone should take advantage of the opportunity to see his work at The Corrigan Gallery on 62 Queen Street.

It is spectacularly interesting. Buggel is an abstract artist, and thinks providing too much information takes away from the imagination of the viewer. You do not need much prompting to get imaginative with his shockingly innovative pieces. And yet, with Buggel’s work, what we are encourage to meditate on isn’t some alien place. His abstract yet intricate, complex, and textured work conjures up memories of home, of the land, of very familiar places.

On his larger “Red Ascending,” on display at this show, he explains some of the process he engages. This painting is “An experiment using new shapes but including some more familiar ones.  The larger vertical and horizontal shapes are held in check by a line of small squares that are not quite evenly spaced, like some jazz phrasing.”

Of late, it seems a theme of his is movement past static things. The effect of passing man-made and natural objects through a car window, for example.

His comments on his paintings give you a sense of how intellectual the project of painting is. Here is how he describes one of his smaller paintings, “Passing Gray-Urban View”:

“I spend most of my time in a very quiet country area and visit town a few times a month.  I see things sometimes like time lapse photography-large buildings jammed up against pavement, gray bands (sidewalks and pavement), and red clay (brick buildings), along with the colors and rectangular shapes of human habitation.”

The Corrigan Gallery will continue to show Buggel’s work until November 30^th.