Bill

“I got into art mostly by accident. I was a trombone player. I hadn’t taken an art class since seventh grade, and I never took art in high school. Music was my thing. When I was at Edmonds Community College, I played in Soundsation under Frank DeMiero. Every year we put on a big jazz festival. High school jazz groups came from around the region to perform, be adjudicated and work with clinicians, and we also brought in guest artists. The students did a lot of the work to make the festival happen, and there were different jobs we could volunteer for. One of those jobs involved climbing up into the gym ceiling and hanging stage lights. It was hot. It was dusty. It was way up in the air. I decided advertising sounded pretty good. I had absolutely no training for it, but I started making things for the festival — posters, newspaper ads, programs, souvenir sweatshirt designs and whatever else needed to be done. I pretty much faked it until I maked it. Then somebody decided I should paint the guest artists. Not little paintings, either. I ended up painting two thirteen-foot-by-thirteen-foot portraits that became stage backdrops — one of Matt Catingub and another of Woody Herman and his Thundering Herd during Herman’s fiftieth anniversary tour. Somehow, they came out great. After the festival, one of my advisors told me I ought to think about going to art school. That was the moment something clicked. I discovered that art didn’t have to mean sitting around trying to think of something profound to paint. Art could have a job. Someone could come to me with a problem — *We need a poster. We need people to know about this event. We need a program. We need a thirteen-foot painting hanging behind Woody Herman* — and I could figure out how to make it happen. I had accidentally discovered **art for a purpose**. That led me to commercial art at the Art Institute of Seattle, then into advertising and graphic design, and eventually to starting Black Horse Productions in 1990. Years later, it also led me into teaching high school art. And strangely enough, teaching has brought me back around to the same discovery I made at that jazz festival. I want students to understand that art is not just about whether you can draw better than the person sitting next to you. Art is communication. It is problem-solving. It is figuring out how to take something that exists in your head and make it exist in the world. I believe students CAN create meaningful art. Sometimes they just need a reason to make it. That idea still drives a lot of what I do. My phrase for it now is **Cause Change**. These days I’m especially interested in art that does something — art that changes a wall, a school, a community, a conversation or the way somebody sees themselves. That is part of what is behind projects like Moving Pictures, a rotating outdoor art gallery I’m working to develop in Omak. Instead of waiting for people to walk into a gallery, the artwork goes out into the community. More than fifty years after my last seventh-grade art class, I’m still figuring out where art is going to take me. I’m okay with that. I never really planned any of this in the first place.”