William Gomez ’27, at age eight, sat cross-legged on the living room floor in Ecuador, notebook in hand, waiting for “Art Attack” to start. The show aired at the same time each week, and every time, William was already positioned in front of the TV before it began, following along, drawing whatever the show made. A few years later, he was the kid in class decorating other students’ caratulas (the hand-drawn covers each middle school notebook required, graded on effort) because someone had to do them and he actually wanted to. He just liked it.
His art supplies growing up were whatever the local stationery carried, which wasn’t much: a pencil, an eraser, occasionally a 2B if he’d saved up enough. A 2B was the darkest value he had access to, and for a while, he assumed that was simply where graphite ended. But what was actually in front of him — mountains from the window, dense flora crowding the yard, the particular quality of light in a place where nature is not scenery but the actual surroundings (that part was abundant) — he drew those things. His parents found the sketchbook one day, flipped through the pages, and celebrated his art.
When he moved to New York City at fourteen and walked into an art supply store for the first time, it was a lot to take in. Tortillons. Kneaded erasers. Walls of paint. His grandmother bought him a large sketchbook and a set of pencils, and one of the first drawings he made with them was of the journey there — he wanted to get down what he’d just seen before it slipped. “I was so excited,” he told me. “I had so many supplies, I didn’t even know how to use these things.” He figured it out.
William studies biology alongside painting, which people tend to find surprising. He, on the other hand, finds their reaction surprising, which I find slightly amusing. For him, the two were never in tension. Both studies involve sustained, specific attention to living systems, to forms that don’t reveal themselves all at once. He talks about scientific illustration as a natural destination: anatomical diagrams, figure painting as a way of understanding the body from the inside out, the point where looking carefully enough becomes its own kind of knowledge. “Art and science are everywhere,” he said, “they’re interconnected.”
In his first oil painting class here, Drawing Into Painting with Sara Lawrence Lightfoot Professor of Art Randall Exon, William came in having worked almost entirely in graphite. Exon noticed the drawing experience veiled underneath the paint early and the way William’s compositions were laid down first as a structural framework before any color arrived. That’s still his process. When I asked him to rank the elements, he said value first, then color, then line, and then reconsidered his placement of line on the list out loud. You could tell he was actually thinking out loud rather than just answering.
What oil gave him was time. Graphite binds the moment it meets the paper’s tooth. Oil stays open, letting you think while the surface is still alive. “I wanted to keep painting on it before it dries,” he said, and something about the way he said it made clear this wasn’t a technical preference so much as a disposition. He had to learn to loosen, to trust the brushstroke wasn’t final, to stop handling paint like a pencil. Exon’s advice helped. YouTube helped. The painting books in McCabe that William flipped through during study breaks in his first year also helped. He was still doing what he’d always done, just with more to figure out.
His color instincts are grounded, perhaps literally. Earth tones, raw umber, ochre, the particular green of things actually growing from the ground, and a principled avoidance of what he calls synthetic vibrancy: colors that announce themselves before you’ve decided to look. “It has to be like nature,” he said, “rather than synthetic.” When I mentioned seeing landscape painters in rural China working from a similar narrow palette, he nodded in agreement. When a color in the natural world reads as vibrant, it earns that from its relationship to everything around it. The vibrancy is contextual, not intrinsic to the color itself.
He also gravitates toward open space, room in a composition for the eye to wander, and the feeling that the scene extends somewhere beyond what’s painted. He grew up where mountains were visible from any window — where stepping outside meant immediate contact with life that was large and abundant. He said he wants to go back and paint those landscapes in oil eventually: the same mountains, light, and plants, now that he knows the medium well enough to try.
His plans for his senior project involve Ecuadorian myths and traditions, immigrant identity, and the figure placed inside scenes that carry cultural and historical weight. He talked about stories that don’t get told because people find them uncomfortable to sit with. “We don’t like to feel that uncomfortable feeling,” he said, “but I think avoiding it is what doesn’t help us grow.” He said it the way you say something you’ve been carrying privately for a while. His work, from what I’ve seen of it, has a quality I’ve struggled to name. Dignified is close to the name, but that implies restraint, and what his paintings actually have is more like weight: things rendered with care because they deserve care. The rendering is an argument for the subject’s value.
One of our shared professors once remarked that our paintings evoked a similar feeling, which we found interesting and neither of us could fully articulate. William and I share enough overlap — graphite foundations, tonal restraint, a shared instinct toward things that don’t call attention to themselves — that the conversation moved easily and the writing afterward moved a bit less so. I’ll be a bit meta: I’ve been writing for Artist of the Week for a few semesters now, and the interviews I find hardest to write are the ones where I understand what the artist is doing and why, paradoxically enough. It makes me slower and a bit more careful, and I spent a long time staring at this one.
Near the end of our conversation, somewhere between me refilling my water bottle and a tangent about language, William arrived at Ludwig Wittgenstein without naming him — the idea that the limits of your language are the limits of your world, and what that means for why you paint. He got there circuitously, losing the thread a few times before finding it. It reminded me of something he’d said earlier about his own process: wanting to give the impression of something rather than its inventory, not the object rendered in full but what it carries, what it means to be looking at it at all. That’s not exactly what I’m after when I paint, but it’s close enough that I recognized it immediately. It also makes sense of his Ecuador plan: going back to paint those landscapes in oil, not to document them. He already did that, at twelve, with a pencil, from his window.
Something else this time.
