Forest III, Pacific Spirit Park, Vancouver, BC

Born and raised in New York City, resided in Houston Texas and Miami Florida, William Betts now resides in California and Connecticut. Betts had a career in tech industries where he established proficiency in computer language and programing. From this, he uses complex industrial processes to create paintings that reflect the possibilities for an analog medium in a digital age. Betts uses his own source material (photographs/videos) as data sets to be examined, sampled, re-contextualized, manipulated and represented. He is typically less interested in content and more concerned with the structural and social aspects of the image.

William Betts was born and raised in New York City, resided in Houston Texas, Miami FL and is currently based in rural Connecticut and Mexico. In 1991, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, Studio Art-Cum Laude from Arizona State University, William Betts has exhibited throughout North America and Europe and in the 2019 Biennale De La Habana, Cuba. His artwork has been featured in the group exhibition, Rasterfahndung (Tracing the Grid), Kunstmuseum, in Stuttgart, Germany, in the Arlington Museum of Art, The University of Texas, The Salt Lake City Art Center, The University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, and the Albuquerque Museum. His selected Bibliography includes The Creators Project (video interview), June 2016; Politician, Københagen, Photo Essay, March 28, 2016; Kinetic, Art from Polsinelli Art Collection, Privately Published 2015; Victoria Machmudov, Under övervakningsradarn, Konstperspektiv, Sweden, June, 2014 and Rasterfahndung (Tracing the Grid), Kunstmuseum Stuttgar (Show Catalog). He was named New American Painting Annual Prize winner in 2011 and featured in issues #60, #72, #84, and #96.

As an artist, I’ve spent much of my career exploring systems of surveillance, privacy, and control using a proprietary, technology-based paint application process I developed to translate digital information into precise layers and areas of color. My work has drawn from security camera footage, low-resolution video feeds, and long lens photography confronting viewers with the aesthetics of a world increasingly shaped by observation and data. That same process, the machine-guided placement of thousands of individual drops of paint, still underpins my current work, but for this body of work, my subject matter has shifted dramatically. I am now focusing on large-scale paintings of forests and other landscapes.

My personal relationship with the outdoors deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic. While urban life contracted and public spaces became restricted, I found myself back in Northwest Connecticut, a place I know well having spent part of my youth and now years later, finding safety and comfort. During daily walks, the dense forests became a place of reflection, a way to mark time and absorb uncertainty. In that solitude, the forest wasn’t an escape from the world but a way of being present within it, beyond the digital noise and mediated experience. Those moments have deeply informed the emotional undercurrent of this body of work.

This turn to nature may seem like a departure in my work, but for me, it’s a continuation of the same inquiry only refracted through a different lens. The forest, in many ways, has become one of the last remaining symbols of escape, quiet, and mystery. Ironically, most people today experience it not through direct interaction, but through technology through Instagram posts, drone footage, GPS tags, and filtered photographs. The forest is increasingly consumed as content; flattened into pixels and optimized for engagement. My paintings reflect this contradiction: They depict natural spaces, but they are built through a mechanical, digitally informed process, one that mirrors the way we encounter nature today, through screens and algorithms.

Yet the meaning of these images extends beyond the mediated experience of the forest. In the age of climate change, the landscapes I paint are not static backdrops but fragile, endangered ecosystems. Wildfires, droughts, invasive species, and shifting weather patterns threaten to erase the very environments that have long stood as symbols of permanence and renewal. By painting them through a process rooted in technology, I am underscoring both the distance we place between ourselves and the natural world, and the urgency of recognizing what we stand to lose. These works become not only reflections of how we see nature, but also reminders of the stakes of our collective inaction—a record of forests that may not exist in the same way for future generations.

What adds another layer of complexity to my current work is that the forests I paint are not untouched wilderness, they are landscapes located in national, state, and provincial parks and forests. These are spaces that have been set aside and protected by institutions. We think of them as wild, yet they are carefully maintained, surveilled, mapped, and controlled. Visitors move through them on prescribed paths, often navigating by smartphone, experiencing the forest through layers of mediation. In this way, the park becomes both a refuge and a regulated zone, a paradox not unlike the one embedded in my own process. By using a system rooted in control and digital precision to depict these curated landscapes, I’m calling attention to the irony that even in our pursuit of nature, we remain within the structures of oversight and design.

There’s an inherent tension in using a method developed to critique surveillance to depict forests that themselves exist within systems of protection and control. I lean into that friction. My work is about the collision between the organic and the synthetic, the immersive and the mediated, the wild and the watched. These paintings are not just landscapes; they are psychological and political spaces shaped by longing, memory, infrastructure, and ideology. They ask what it means to seek refuge in nature when that refuge is itself a managed experience and whether we can ever truly escape the systems we’ve built around ourselves.