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The Hands And Heart Of An Artist: Meet Bill Holway

photo provided Working on tapes to teach the classical style of drawing to students, Bill works a full day every day on his projects as he has for many years.

photo provided The hands of an artist, Bill Holway continues his passion for drawing under the classical style of the Renaissance masters

photo provided Sketched in a series and with an internal rhythm, these Renaissance war horses begin to take shape on the page.

Tuesday January 18, 2011

By Cookie Steponaitis

As the winter light cascades down from the window of his Kennedy Brothers studio, Bill Holway works, oblivious to the noise and movement around him. His hand rests on a light board and he recreates image after image, with a flow and rhythm that seems set to an internal timing and not one imposed by the confines of space and time. Pausing to welcome the newcomer to his loft, Bill holds out his hand and with a firm grasp and a smile, welcomes the visitor to his world of classic art training and intuitive drawing.Bill, within minutes of sharing his story and passion for art, has already pointed out styles and selected pieces of the works of Renaissance masters Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Donatello, while in the same breath extolling the skills and passion for art he learned from his Rutland School art teacher Lucy Doane, some seventy plus years ago. Even to the non-artist, it is quickly apparent that Bill Holway is on a journey that has immersed him in the world of classic art and that he continues to evolve and change with each new chapter of his life.

“You know that Picasso drew all day long, seven days a week,” shared Bill, when queried about his work ethic. Present at his space in Kennedy Brothers every single day, Bill continues to work and draw hours a day as he has for the past eighty years. Bill entered the world of art through the medium of woodwork and whittling and claims it was the beginning of his passion for drawing. One of the first teachers ever hired at Frog Hollow in Middlebury when it opened, Bill’s skill is tempered by his desire to teach all his students safe ways to handle knives and to carve. Over the years his talents with wood have taken him down the path of creating wooden puppets, Rocking Horses, Eagles, a line of Noah’s Ark’s animals and led him to work in marble as well. “One of my early pieces, out of blue marble, called Moses, is in a museum in Maine,” shared Bill. It was a 200 lb. block and took several months to complete.

The process of repetition and improvement is evident with each project or phase of Bill’s life long passion for art. Similar to the classical artists of the Renaissance who were trained to draw and repeat, draw and repeat and refine and refine, Bill takes each of his projects to new and more complex levels, while always coming full circle to the process of drawing in repetition. “With the rocking horse,” Bill reflected, “I was asked to create one for a neighbor’s child. The result was good but crude. I thought I could do better and I would work at it again and again refining and improving. Some of the later projects were made out of Idaho Pine and were based on English Rocking Horses that were for the children of Queen’s and Kings as well as the Parthenon Horses of Ancient Greece.”

While many people might find the hours of work a day tedious and monotonous, Bill is not only at home, but at a place of peace and joy in this part of the artistic process. “I am making tapes and pages of a primer for students,” he commented. “I sit down everyday with pleasure and draw. The repetition hones your skills to focus on details as small as the amount of water needed for each brush stroke and the formative statements made by the positioning of the body and even the angle of the head.” Using the works of the Masters as inspiration and a source of his repetitions, Bill explains how this form of training transitions into the more open form of intuitive drawing. “Sculptors of the Renaissance era and up until the 1930’s have this sense of form that is intuitive. In their mind they see the raw block of marble in its finished form. Michelangelo would take a stone ax to a 15 ton piece of marble and in one morning reduce it to a roughed out piece of work with features emerging and coming to life. Their skill came from an internal place, but also from the hours and hours of work in the classic model of training, which included repetitive drawings of anatomy, animals, and pieces of the world around them.”

The “art from art” approach that Bill uses in his own life appears in many different mediums that the artist has worked in.  In addition to wood, marble, watercolors, oil, and pen and ink, Bill explores styles and patterns of art from around the globe and through time. While he calls himself a “…back room workman not a total producer who needs a no nonsense art director ,” Bill is aware of one constant -  “Not only does my blood pressure go down at the completion of every sheet of one hundred mannequins.” Bill remarked, “At the end of the day I am very aware just how much better I get. By going through the process again and again, you see the birth of each line and each form again and again. It is imprinted in your mind and in your skills.”
While demonstrating to this reporter some of his repetition drawings, this time in the form of the work of Jacques Callot (1532-1635), the first lines and strokes take on a vitality and a power as each line is advanced and the base drawing is added to with form and defining qualities. Adorning the pages of Bill’s work are mannequins in the form of the work of Da Vinci and the sculpted form of draft horses ridden into battle in War of the Roses. Yet another page recreates the unique style of the fashion drawings from the 1930’s New York Times where artists drew each ad and mannequin printed.

At eighty years old, Bill has no plans to slow down or to even think about stopping his work ethic and patterns around his art. “This is the heart of art,” he reflected as the interview drew to a close. In the repetition and practice of the classical art training are the skills to create line, shape, and form that render people not as cardboard portraitures, but as paintings.” He creates each drawing with painstaking accuracy and repetition, and it is evident that the flow and power that moves his hands comes from inside. He is an artist that creates to explore the intricacies of the human form, the power of nature and the potential in each brush stroke. Silhouetted against the light board Bill’s hands move with a grace and ease of an artist whose passion for art has been life long and taken on many forms of expression. “If today I am good,” mused Bill, “Then tomorrow I will be better.”  These are the words of a man who has a passion for the basics and thinks in terms of making art a process by looking to the masters of different crafts and then consistently repeating the styles, skills and basic brush strokes of their craft. Bill Holway is keeping alive the classical training approach to art and bringing to his own work an intuitive desire to merge the power of the masters with the creativity of a man of the twenty-first century, who continues to live his life around art, day in and day out, one brush stroke at a time.

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