Billy Cone

Billy Cone is the grand nephew of Etta and Claribel Cone who famously collected the work of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and other modern painters with whom they socialized before bequeathing their collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Cone painted on and off since the 1980's as well as photographing cities of Europe and the U.S., seriously pursuing an art career in 2000.

Traveling extensively between the U. S. and Europe—from his native North Carolina to New York, Los Angeles and Miami; Paris, Venice and London—Cone finds depth in the faces, places, nature, scultpture and architecture. He has an affinity for detail, color and light.

Mapping the landscape of human emotion, Billy captures range and depth in subtle nuances—variations in the arrangement of facial features and hands. Rooted in the juxtaposition of  ideals espoused by the Abstact Realism Movement, his artistic journey, making the transition from photographic prints to drawings on paper and paintings on canvas one decade ago, has been an organic transcendence.

Studies in portraiture at SPEOS Paris Ecole de Photographie in 2002 led to the creation of a body of work inspired by Parisian statuary. Billy found the stone faces filled with emotion, and his contrasty grainy black and white images contributed a timeless quality to his catalogue, a hardbound folio, “Living Statues Photographies." His work was featured in a solo photography exhibition at Mark Hachem Gallery, Paris, in Spring 2004.

What followed until 2009 was an obsession with capturing human expression and was eventually compiled into the 2014 release of “Femme," a collection of black and white portraits of women of different cultures and nationalities: Native American, Russian, Cameroonian, Vietnamese, Thai women all found in Paris and here in America.

Cone continued full steam with his fine art after 2007.  His portraits or Facetures, of known and unknown personalities, mostly women, allow him more control over his subject.  In the Half & Half series, he combines iconic black and white photographs with line drawings to mint hybrids like Albrecht Durer, The Mona Lisa, Maria Callas, and Josephine Baker adding a new audience.

But all that said, Billy Cone is a photographer, born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960.  He catches the unexpected in an ephemeral image. 

Billy Cone has been a volunteer art supervisor for at-risk kids and supporter of Dreams Center for Art Education in Wilmington, NC and was appointed by former Governor Mike Easley to serve on the North Carolina State Art Society board of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, 2007-2010.