William Paul Thomas: Achromatopsia Panacea

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Photo courtesy of Preservation Chapel Hill

"Lindsay's Friend" by William Paul Thomas

Event times: Sun., Sept. 9, 2-4 p.m. -The color blue teems with different emotional registers. In author Maggie Nelson's Bluets, for example, the color embodies a seductive fluidity bound up in anxiety and loss—the condition of "feeling blue." In William Paul Thomas's new exhibit, running through September after this opening reception, a steely blue edges into subjects' faces—a reference to cyanosis, the discoloration that results from oxygen deprivation, a metaphor for the disenfranchisement of African Americans under white supremacy. Thomas, who moved to North Carolina to earn a fine-art degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, is now a visiting professor at Duke University. His work is primarily portraiture, and his oil paintings of men are squared so closely on their faces that you can almost feel their breath. This urgent intimacy is furthered by the fact that most of Thomas's subjects are friends or community members. His portraits are literally disembodied, but the effect is one of full embodiment: that which is seen, recognized, and carefully evoked. —Sarah Edwards

The color blue teems with different emotional registers. In author Maggie Nelson's Bluets, for example, the color embodies a seductive fluidity bound up in anxiety and loss—the condition of "feeling blue." In William Paul Thomas's new exhibit, running through September after this opening reception, a steely blue edges into subjects' faces—a reference to cyanosis, the discoloration that results from oxygen deprivation, a metaphor for the disenfranchisement of African Americans under white supremacy. Thomas, who moved to North Carolina to earn a fine-art degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, is now a visiting professor at Duke University. His work is primarily portraiture, and his oil paintings of men are squared so closely on their faces that you can almost feel their breath. This urgent intimacy is furthered by the fact that most of Thomas's subjects are friends or community members. His portraits are literally disembodied, but the effect is one of full embodiment: that which is seen, recognized, and carefully evoked. —Sarah Edwards