In Clotho (The Spinner), Daniel Bilmes Paints Like a Weaver

Daniel Bilmes builds a surface the way a spinner works a distaff: pull a long stroke of oil across the panel, let it thin toward the end, then drag a second stroke through it before the first has fully set. Under close light, the paint on Clotho (The Spinner) — a 41 × 41 cm oil on panel from 2021 — reads less like brushwork than like fiber, overlapping filaments of warm ochre and cool grey-blue that catch and interlace rather than simply sitting in layers. Only after that surface registers does the title do its work. Clotho is the youngest of the three Moirai in Greek myth, the Fate who spins the thread of a life onto her spindle before her sisters measure it and cut it. Bilmes hasn’t illustrated her so much as borrowed her technique.

That correspondence isn’t incidental. Bilmes has described his own process as built on long, deliberate strokes and on scraping back into the paint before it fully dries — a method that leaves his surfaces looking pulled or drawn rather than simply applied. It is a technique refined over roughly a decade of private study, beginning at age eight under his father, the painter and educator Semyon Bilmes, at the family’s art school in southern Oregon, which later relocated to Maui as Atelier Maui. By the time Bilmes began exhibiting professionally — first with Arcadia Contemporary in Los Angeles, later in New York and through Beinart Gallery, Modern Eden, and Gallery 1261 — that scraped, fibrous surface had become the load-bearing element underneath everything else in his work: a face, a shoulder, a gesture, all built from a texture that behaves like spun or woven material rather than paint.

Clotho (The Spinner) dates from 2021, the same year Bilmes held his solo exhibition “Eternal Recurrence” at Arcadia Contemporary’s Soho location — a title that already points at thread, cycle, and repetition as recurring concerns in his output around that period. The painting has since sold, but it sits comfortably inside the wider run of mythologically and symbolically titled work — Metamorphosis, Anonymous XVI, Veiled V — through which Bilmes keeps returning to a small set of questions: what a body is becoming, what it is hiding, and here, what it is making. Arcadia has described his practice as one that blurs “the distinction between the visible and the palpable,” and Clotho is as literal a demonstration of that idea as the artist has painted — a picture about spinning thread, rendered in a technique that spins thread.

There is a quieter echo in the choice of subject, too. Bilmes was taught to paint by his father starting at age eight, one long line of instruction passed hand to hand over roughly ten years before he ever exhibited publicly. In 2026 he opens Methods, an online program for painters built around exactly that kind of transmission — a process, in his own framing, genuinely their own but taught rather than found alone. A painting about the Fate who spins the thread that others will later measure sits naturally at the center of a career that has always been, in one way or another, about who hands the thread to whom.