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A Conversation With Artist Bill Holway

photo by Larry Johnson Bill Holway resident artist at Kennedy Brothers shown working on his art.

Tuesday October 30, 2007

By Larry Johnson

    Bill Holway definitely listens to the beat of a different drummer. Born in Rutland, Vermont in 1931, Bill was destined to become an artist and an informal teacher of art. He is an artist in residence at Kennedy Brothers in Vergennes and spends seven to eight hours a day, six and seven days a week, practicing his art in the upstairs’ gallery, surrounded by examples of contemporary art of all kinds by local artists.

     Bill finished his freshman year at Rutland High School and then transferred to the Vilas School in Alstead, New Hampshire, where he completed his sophomore and junior years. He again transferred, and this time to Mt. Herman where he spent the next semester. Temporarily tired of school, Bill then hitchhiked across the United States to Los Angeles, working his way to the West Coast. Along the way, he took various jobs and once in California aligned himself with the Riverside Congregational Church. It was here that Bill found himself acting a minor role in a play, whose main Character Vincent Price, was playing the part of God.

     During his year-long stay in L.A., Bill enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles. The following summer, after returning to Vermont from his sojourn in California, Bill once again hitchhiked across the U.S., ending up in Wyoming, bucking bales in a hayfield.

     Returning home to the East Coast, Bill got a job in Boston working in a mental hospital. During his off-time, he took courses at the School of Practical Art and at Tufts University. The Korean War was in full swing and Bill was marking time, waiting to be drafted. For better or worse, he was involved in a farm accident and both of his arms were dislocated from their shoulder sockets; this was enough to keep him out of the war.

     In the early 50s Bill enrolled in a pre-theological course in Bangor, Maine, where he spent the next two years studying Greek and psychology. Post Bangor, he enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.  Most of his fellow students were veterans on the G.I. Bill and were serious about art. This rubbed off on Bill and, he admitted, he learned a great deal from these men and women who had already experienced the world outside academia. Although he left without a degree, Bill felt that he had gotten what he’d needed in order to practice his art.

    I use the word “practice” intentionally because that is what Bill does. He draws from memory, a skill that was traditional during the Renaissance period. For instance, Rubens learned from Leonardo by copying his art, and then added his own artistic signature to what he had copied.

     Bill describes what he does, day after day at Kennedy Brothers, as performance drawing. Performing live and fast enough to be entertaining. Cartoonist, for instance, are also performance artist, “drawing from a well-source of comedic insights.”

     Bill starts each page of water color drawings with forty squares or cubes, as he calls them. These are quickly turned into pictures which come from his memory. For instance, if it’s a face he is drawing, each of the forty faces will have a slightly different perspective. The eyes will be looking a particular direction, the expressions will be slightly different and the figure may be revolving around a slightly different axis.

     Bill draws these figures at lightning speed, from memory and each of the forty cubes turns into a face, a body, a horse or a cow instantaneously. Cows are difficult to draw, according to Bill. He moves from one to another of these forty cubes without hesitation and the page becomes alive with recognizable and inspiring art work.

     “Skill-budding is the whole purpose of the thing,” Bill explained, and this results from drawing the same thing over and over. “Each time you do a drawing the better it gets, and the better you get. And the better you get the more motivated you are to draw. Do 1000 knees and you will become an expert on knees. Just do one view over and over and you will become an expert on that view.”

     Bill credits his type of performance art with a short stint he had at trying to build rocking horses in his parents’ barn. After a while, he realized that he was destroying a lot of good lumber because he didn’t really understand horses. At that point he quit making horses and started drawing them---hundreds of them from all sorts of angles. “The model is in my head. I draw forty individuals on one sheet of paper in 10 minutes. If I drew a chair,” Bill told me, “a basic chair with four legs, this is also a basic form of a horse figure.” So practicing chairs will also provide practice in drawing horses. One leads to another.

     Admittedly, Bill’s art is more of a practice than it is a traditional art form. A traditional artist draws or paints an object and that painting stands alone as a finished piece. Bill draws the same object over and over, studying it from different angles. It is never “finished” in the traditional sense. It is forever a work in progress.

     “My goal is to produce a video that will give the watcher an understanding of the first steps in drawing and calligraphy,” Bill explained. “The purpose will be to give the budding artist beginning drawing skills, and, most importantly, the motivating force of a coach.  Ideally, the student will feel growing improvement by using Bill’s method of multiple drawings.

     Until the video is finished, however, Bill will be plying his unusual art at Kennedy Brothers in Vergennes. Why not stop by and say hello to a gentle man and watch a gifted performance artist at work with brush and pen?

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