About Me

Some of my earliest memories as a rug-rat are of lying on my stomach on the floor, drawing. In that, I was no different from any other child – virtually every parent has one of their kid’s drawings stuck to the refrigerator. Thinking now about this, it’s obvious that art is as natural a human communication medium as language. Just as we all have the ability to learn to speak and thereby reveal some of our internal state to others, so we all have the ability to draw pictures to do the same.

We prize a person’s ability to shape language. History is full of celebrated orators, and then of course there is Cicero and Shakespeare and all the rest of the great authors. There is little disagreement about these people’s ability. But when it comes to the visual arts, we do not so easily grant greatness or even significance and we certainly do not easily agree about what is “good” art as opposed to “bad.”

Now, I must admit that I speak here from within my cultural bias: I was born and raised in the Western World (well, Chicago, to be exact) and therefore perhaps other cultures view the visual arts differently. But my experience undoubtedly parallels that of many other young artists in the West and that is that when it came time to go to university, my father announced that I would not enroll in an art curriculum: instead I would become an engineer, otherwise he would not pay my tuition. And here, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was the first and probably biggest compromise of my life because I agreed to become an engineer.

So the visual arts became my avocation rather than my vocation. But I do not regret caving in to my father’s oh-so-practical demand. Over the subsequent decades I learned that engineering is an art, too, as are cooking and gardening and in fact, life and living.

As this website shows, I have kept doing art all my life although I’ve been a bit sporadic about it because sometimes years pass between paintings. On the other hand, I have a bit of a magpie in that I am easily distracted by this or that medium. I also wonder why those other kids put away the crayons and stopped drawing – to me it would be like deciding to stop speaking or writing.

- Bill Bohnenberger
Seattle, 2011