William Otto

Medium pastel on ampersand archival paper by William Otto titled Navigating Back Home.

Artist Statement

My journey begins with the infinity of Nature, of which we are an integral part. The natural world that presents itself in the familiar forms of images, objects, places, and the whole complexity of life, is itself my laboratory for ideas and imaginings.

From these encounters, I strive to emulate the dream experience which reconstitutes the memories, recollections and archetypal patterns that emerge from the individual and collective subconscious.

My objective is to present these imagined reconfigurations of nature to suggest the world we perceive is itself both a construct of our minds and a pantheon of symbolic metaphors of the numinous; a mythic, transcendent realm of infinite dimensions, forever mysterious and ineffable.

By evoking the active imagination through art in this manner, I’m actively developing and responding to a personal pantheon of psychic images, thereby evolving the individuation process as an artist and as a human being.