William Quinn

William Quinn graduated in 1953 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Illinois.

Quinn's love affair with Europe began as early as 1957 when the University awarded him a Milliken Foreign Travel Scholarship to spend a year painting in Rome. Subsequently he spent sabbaticals in Greece (1963) and Paris (1982), and often painted during summers in Europe before he finally would settle first in Bruges, Belgium, then in Vence, Southern France.

Impressed by his experiences with Europe on the one hand and the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York, led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell on the other, Quinn synthesized the elements of the European modernists with the gestural style of "Action Painting" common to certain American Abstract Expressionists.

At the University, where expressionists Max Beckmann and Phillip Guston had recently taught, Quinn had a 33-year teaching career that enabled him to dialogue with American and European painters on the latest ideas and issues in contemporary art.

During his 'European Period' Quinn would "pull out all the stops". The paintings are spacious and bold, often with surprising color combinations that have always been an engaging aspect of his work. Many of his recent works show white grounds in tension with aggressive, contrasting planes. Others have linear structures that seem to create a 'real' space - but then again the lines dart back to surface, asserting the paintings' two-dimensionality, sometimes suggesting landscape or figurative elements.