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Well I'm going to develop a page that introduces me to my friends and collectors. First let me welcome one and all to my online gallery and store. Here you can choose galleries by subject and zoom in on thumbnails that interest you. When you choose a picture you like you can make your purchase from the gallery. So far most people have preferred to purchase their selections by emailing or phoning me direct. So this page is intended to introduce you to the person on the other end of the line. Eventually I will fill this page with photos. But for now a brief bio should help. My name is Bill Parsons. I began drawing around age four and that first moment is my earliest life memory. A friend and I were looking at a dinosaur comic book and I came up with the idea of drawing a dinosaur. I drew a Tyrannosaurs Rex and we then held up our drawings for our parents to admire. Well mine got so much praise and attention that from that day on, I was an artist. I lived in New Castle Pennsylvania for the first 17 years of my life, during the golden age of small town living. The Pennsylvania countryside was beautiful and the woods and creeks were everywhere for a boy to play in. My dad was offered a large sales territory in California, which amounted to a nice promotion, and so we were off to California. Moving to California changed everyone in my family and really introduced me to fine art. My highschool in the Bay Area seemed to this boy from Pennsylvania more like a college. I could choose many of my own courses and the curriculum was full of classes that appealed to a creative student. This was unheard of for me and I was in highschool heaven. My art teacher introduced me to old masters fine art and allowed me to experiment with painting enough to where I could produce a pretty good copy of old masters paintings. But unfortunatley my teacher also convinced me that realistic art was gone from the art school curriculums and replaced with abstract art. This was an enormous let down for me. So I skipped art school and went to college instead with a double major in Religion and Sociology, hoping to become a professor or a minister or a researcher. I really was not sure of what I wanted to do. But I did matriculate into a liberal arts college, which began a journey for me of self-discovery. My entire education was really an extended period of searching. The entire nine years of college and graduate school was really a process of learning about myself and came full circle in my final year of graduate school. When I was twenty five and had graduated from college, I grew curious about a tiny studio-art school down town where a retired commercial art director taught fine art. His name was Ken Moore, I signed up. Basically what I learned from Ken was composition and design. How to tell a good painting from a bad based on focal point and arrangement of the visual elements. Ken always said that I was the best student that he ever had and encouraged me to start selling my pictures. I went to seminary soon after meeting Ken and actually worked for the Methodist church for four years, before painting exerted its much stronger pull on me. Though I continued drawing and painting while in college and seminary, it was not my major course of study, because abstract art had dominated the market, both in gallery art and in illustration. But by the time I was 30 and had graduated from seminary, art became my full time interest. In 1982, the most important event of my life occurred. I married a beautiful lady named Diane. Diane is truely the love of my life and has been my inspiration and emotional support ever since. This was truely a match made in heaven. Two people with unique needs and goals who matched perfectly. Diane is much more interesting than my little life, but I will go on with me for now. In the mid 80's I met a wonderful art teacher named David Hardy. David was a tremendous teacher of the Baroque school of art. A real purist, who used rabbit skin glue and cooked his own oils. His art education was from the finest eastern studios and it showed in his instruction method. From David I learned the authentic painting techniques of the old masters and have been thankful that having David Hardy as a teacher has been part of my destiny. Without a doubt my art education was as complete as can be. Composition, drawing, and painting technique are the foundations that every artist must learn. Of course I continue to learn, but very few art students are exposed to the thorough and historic principles that I have been blessed to learn. The only way that I can explain my meetings with these key people is that God had a plan. But the next important chapter in my art career involved learning the market. Unfortuately that is a reality that hits hard for some artists. But I thoroughly enjoy the subjects that I paint. They are truely expressions of me. Though my first five years in the art market place was a hard learning experience, mixed with occassional real successes, I feel confident that the things I love to paint are the things I paint best. Interestingly, the subject that I enjoy the most was actually the last one that I embraced. Because art school involved still life, statuary, figure and portrait, it took me a while to move on from these fascinating subjects. At my wife's patient suggestion, I finally tried landscape. When I finished my first picture, I realized that I had found a new love. I was already painting landscapes into my horse paintings, so it was not a new territory. But I entered landscape painting as I do every new endeavor--with lots of research. I researched mostly the late 19th century landscape painters and was spellbound by the beauty and grace of their paintings. As I developed my landscape art, the pictures became richer. I added people and architecture into my landscape. This really motivated me because I was not interested in painting the wilderness. I'm more appreciative of local landscape, close to hearth and home. So that's where I finally evolved and laid my hat. Well that's enough for now. Eventually I want to write a short piece about my philosophy of art and my aesthetics. For me drawing and painting and creating are spiritual experiences. I hope I can pen a clear and simple statement of how that all makes sense for me. So please return for my next installment. |
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Here are some links to sites that I value. (1). www.romancing-the-home.com/ Romancing the Home is a beautiful and very popular award winning store in Benicia, California that sells beautiful cottage, Tuscany and victorian style home decor and furniture. They also sell framed and unframed giclee prints of my newest art work. Romancing the Home has made my art work very popular in Benicia. Please visit their web site or better yet visit their store at 617 First St. in Benicia, CA. (2). www.artrenewal.org/ This is without a doubt the most exciting, unbelievable, timely web site on the internet for old masters style painting past and present. It's bursting at the seams with gorgeous pictures from every era of classical painting and just as replete with articles about why traditional realism should never have gotten tossed from the art departments and galleries starting in the turn of the century. Hard hitting factual and brilliant articles critical of abstract art and praising classical realism has made this the most popular and revolutionary art web site in the world. No kidding. Just visit the ArtRenewal web site and you will be as impressed and glad as everyone who visits. |