CCS was honored to showcase 50 individuals and activities during our 50th Anniversary in 2017-2018 to share our rich history. Take a look at the amazing people responsible for making our unconventional College possible!   

Parabolic Painting: A late blossom from a CCS education

Brian Williams (CCS Art 68-72) dropped out months from graduation, disillusioned not by the free and eclectic academic environment of CCS, but by the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the polarization of political life in the United States. He wound up in Japan where he has built a very successful career as an artist. He credits much of that success to his time at CCS. “To the self-directed study skills I slowly developed at CCS. To the openness to differing ideas and the cross-disciplinary spirit of inquiry fostered there. And to the fact that these were not just abstract concepts; the staff of the College, and faculty and students both actually living these ideals and teaching by example.”

He had planned in his early teens to be a marine biologist, and collected over 20,000 mollusks with proper data from the little-studied Chilean coast (smelly shells eventually purchased by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History). “I grew up with limited prospects in the remote Andes of Peru and then the deserts of Northern Chile, raised by missionary parents, and then parachuted in my junior year into a marvelously endowed high school in Redlands, California.” Intoxicated by the possibilities, he tried everything. As he had passed the language requirement, he opted for an art class. “My art teacher Bernard Lowrey had a two-tiered approach: basic requirements for those just putting in time, and absolute freedom with judicious artistic guidance for those who really wanted to do Art. It was like CCS in high school,” he said. Within a few months Brian realized he wanted to be an artist. Brian heard lots about CCS from a high school classmate who came to CCS to pursue Art (Laura Wimberley, CCS Art 71), and he instantly knew CCS was for him.

Brian laughed as he recalls his record at UCSB and CCS as a bit spotty. He maintained his scholarships and academic standing, but he took a short but wild detour with experiments in communal living as well as anti-war and environmental activism. He vividly remembers the campaign to save the slough adjacent to campus. Brian recalls fondly painting murals for the computer center, the ceiling of Borsodi’s coffee shop in the burnt-out Bank of America building, and on various walls in Isla Vista. Academically, Brian tried every aspect of pictorial art: realistic, abstract, even conceptual, gravitating eventually to landscape painting simply because it gave him the most satisfaction. He explained: “It was wonderful to be able to take classes in anything: astronomy, choral music, French and Japanese, tai chi, Chinese art history, and others. Marvin Mudrick’s classes in creative writing were especially enlightening, and discussions with Ed Loomis on the primacy of direct experience inspirational.” The etching press at the College led Brian to printmaking, a valuable source of income for many years. “When the military draft no longer hung over my head,” he said, “I dropped out, sold the camper van I had built, and several months later arrived in Japan on a one-way ticket with $300 in my pocket.”

Fast-forward 45 years, he has had over 100 one-man shows and a number of museum exhibitions, sold over 10,000 works of art, climbed Kilimanjaro and Island Peak in Nepal, walked across the Taklamakan Desert in China, painted Manta Rays underwater in Yap and the Moai of Easter Island by moonlight, and more. He is fluent in Japanese as well as in Spanish, English, and “Art.” He is often on Japanese television and in print media, usually in connection with either his artwork or his environmental activism (mainly centered on Biwa, Japan’s Great Lake). He recently published a book of paintings and essays based on an essay-image combination column he made for a Japanese newspaper.

Brian continues to create. In 2007, over the strenuous objections of his wife, he purchased a bucket truck to allow him to paint from the truck. “It is important, literally as well as figuratively, to see things from differing viewpoints. And it was painting from this truck that came to me this great revelation: the human visual field is spherical in sensation,” the artist exclaimed. While the ground cuts off half of our visual sphere, being 30 feet up he realized that he could curve a painting surface, breaking away from flat and rectilinear formats and create a unique spherical visual sensation. Brian asserts, “the fast prototyping of a hastily scrawled sketch, scissor into a irregular curving shape, bent into a curve and held up to my eyes, convinced me this was a remarkable discovery. The sensation of presence, space and depth were astonishing, far more than any flat image could convey. And it is this sensation of presence after all, that is the first goal of all representational art.” Brian named this new style of painting parabolic painting, and has never looked back: a museum show, a bilingual book, an unprecedented art installation on the famous balconies of the World Heritage Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, and a backlog of commissions.

Without the attitudes of eclectic cross-disciplinary investigation, self-directed effort, and fierce independence, which CCS helped me to develop, I would never have come this far, and I am grateful.

- Brian Williams

Brian and his wife live in a 400-year old restored farm outside of Osaka, Japan and are parents of 3 adult daughters.

He provides this advice to current and future students:

• Don’t let preconceptions or perceptions of difficulty defeat you before you even get started.
• Progress and innovation in human societies are like a sea urchin. The point is that most people image progress and innovation to be advancing along some kind of linear unidirectional straight line. Progress is moving outward not only in 360 directions (that’s still flat thinking) but in radially out in every possible direction. Cue interdisciplinary study and eclectic mix and match approaches, and a whole world of possibilities emerge.
• People often tell you to “think outside the box." It’s important to remember that boxes are basically structures of straight lines. If you’re not breaking free of linear thinking, you’re not really outside of the box yet.
• Meaning in Life is not something you go out and find. It is something you make and thus give to your life, not once, but on an ongoing basis, as long as you live. 
• Everything is interesting.
• You won’t get much done in human society without a strong social network, and those take care and feeding. Reciprocity is important.