Presentation of Sab WILL

I am a self-taught British abstract artist, photographer of the streets of Paris, and occasional poet. I grew up in the UK but have lived in France for nearly 20 years.

My main influences are Klee, Miro, Kandinsky and many of the abstract expressionists. I love playing with shapes, colours and juxtapositions, imagining human emotions and motivations emanating from them.

I have tried hard, and finally succeeded in finding an encapsulating'framework'for my art : my'infinity squared'concept, which I describe below.

Training and courses of Sab WILL

I am entirely self-trained, or'untrained', if you prefer. I learn from absorbing the works of others and combining them with my own ideas and experiments, all linked to my'infinity squared'creation.

The artworks of Sab WILL

'infini2'. That's French for Infinity Squared. Which is my artistic calling card. So what's it all about? Well, let me try to explain.

First of all, do have a look at this video, which lets you see how my pictures are constructed and what you can do with them.

As you can see, my pictures are actually nine square canvases or other supports put together to form a larger square.

There is a vast number of possibilities for combining these nine elements, and I don't impose any fixed configuration on the final work. It's up to the person who observes or possesses the painting to decide which layout pleases them most. There is nothing to stop you from chosing a different configuration every day.

When someone acquires one of my paintings, I present it to them not as a flat, fixed, finished piece, but rather as a stack of nine canvases. It's then up to them to make up their picture themselves, a bit like a puzzle.

The thing which fascinates me most is that there really is no starting or finishing point. This might seem a bit strange, but in fact it's true. If you look at any of the pictures in the infini2/infinity squared style, you will note that you can take the right-hand column and move it over to the left (or the left-hand column and move it over to the right) and the painting will be perfectly complete with no breaks in the patterns whatsoever. The same thing happens if you take the top row and move it down to the bottom, or move the bottom row up to the top. The picture will be just as continuous as before. You can start with any of the smaller squares in any position and build up a complete picture from there.

Of course, I don't impose any order on the painting, so there is nothing to stop you ignoring the actual motif altogether and putting the squares together in a completely random or personal order. And why not display the picture as a diamond shape instead of a square. The number of possibilities is around one or two hundred billion, so there's not much chance you'll run out of new pictures any time soon.

There's another way of looking at my Infinity Squared pictures. And that's metaphorically.

For me, each picture represents a life. Seemingly complete and unattached to any other as we human beings appear, we came, nevertheless, from our parents, and we could quite possibly create other creatures in the form of sons and daughters - it happens all the time.

Well my paintings are like that. They seem to stand alone, and have beginnings and endings, in the form of edges. And yet, in any picture you can see that it doesn't actually finish neatly at any of the edges, and often there are shapes or lines which quite clearly fall off the ends of the canvas.

And indeed, if you move one of the rows or columns over to the other side, you can see that in fact any given edge wasn't really the start or end of the painting at all; it carried on and the process can be repeated over and over again to the end of time because there is no beginning or end to my pictures; they simply don't'start'or'finish', or even have a'this way up'but they do exist in any given state for a certain period, almost as though they are marking time, until someone comes along and moves them on into another form.

And like lives, and the billions of different, unique manifestations of men and women with a body, two arms, two legs and a head, all over the planet, my Infinity Squared paintings can be configured in billions of different ways whilst still superficially seeming to conform to that 3 x 3 grid.

I guess I could also add that this idea is what I was looking for, as an artist, for many years - that identifying theme or'thing'which will allow me to both focus my work and flower and expand as an artist. Strange as it may seem, I've finally understood that by giving ourselves contexts, in this case this 3 x 3 structure, we set ourselves free. It's not the restriction I at first thought it would be, and until I found my own personal signature I was just drifting around not producing anything with any coherence or common theme.

I sometimes wonder if having the way the pictures are presented is valid as an artistic signature, as opposed to developing a particular painting style. But the more I discover about creativity and originality and how some of the greats have become great, it is very much about finding your own thing and sticking to it, whatever others may say. And of course those who criticise viciously are normally those who don't actually create themselves, or they'd understand, so they don't matter. It's an ideal, for sure, to follow your way no matter what, and what about earning some money by painting what will sell and so on? But from the purely artistic point of view I subscribe to the above point of view. And try to live it.