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"A painting as an object neatly encapsulates the artistic experience as I see it”. |
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Crossover Art
 The Artist William R. “Bill” Ford, Jr. was born in Montgomery, Alabama. His father was an educator and artist, his mother an elementary school reading teacher.
This would spark a lifelong interest in art and literature in Bill and establish a pattern for his professional career. He attended St. Jude’s Educational Institute from the first through the twelfth grades. He attended Alabama State University, where he majored in Art and studied with Drs. John Hall, A.L. Britt, Callie Warren and Ellen Larkins. After working in retail management in camera and stereo sales, and later jewelry sales in Charlotte, NC, he returned to Montgomery in 1980. While attending technical college, he landed a part-time job at WSFA Television typing name supers for the afternoon news show. Twenty-two years later, he is still there, the last 17 years as Art Director.
He is involved in a wide variety of graphics production – from set design and news graphics, sales and web page design, printed materials and digital photography. His tenure has transitioned from t-squares and drawing tables to paintboxes to desktop computers, the latter introduced into the art department by Bill himself in the early ‘90s.
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Working at WSFA has afforded him the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology and state of the art equipment. It also allows him to work in a variety of formats: digital video, print and advertising as well as 3D computer imaging. This gives him a versatility and facility that very few professional artists can achieve in today’s world of specialization. “The good thing about the situation at ‘SFA is it keeps the job from getting stale, but the drawback is I stay so busy it’s hard to keep up with the software changes”. One constant in his professional arsenal is Adobe Photoshop. “The first desktop computer I used was my own that I brought to work before WSFA even had any – not that we didn’t use computers, but they were expensive dedicated machines called paintboxes.
I went in with coworker (and talented photographer), James Guier and purchased the Adobe “bundle”; Photoshop and Illustrator, with the idea being he would take Photoshop and I, Illustrator”.
“We each threw in a copy of our part to the other, but it wasn’t long before I realized which software was most attractive to me. It was intuitive; all the icons were things I knew how to use in the real world so I needed no explanation how to use them in the virtual. My early training at ASU was as a painter, and I most admire painters Picasso, Michelangelo, Jacob Lawrence, Basquiat, Warhol. A painting as an object neatly encapsulates the artistic experience as I see it”.
At ASU, instructor William Henderson exposed Bill to serigraphy or silk-screening.
“This was the first time I had ever seen any of my own work in a medium other than pencil, pen or paint. I recall the very moment when I removed a print after the final run, I was amazed that this mechanical process had given me what I thought at the time was awesome. I contemplated it for a second or two before saying ‘I’ll never use a brush again!’ At that moment, Dr. Britt was walking through the studio. He stopped in front of me, put his hands in his pockets and said, ‘Don’t say that Ford’, not in an angry way, but in a way that made me understand that this man (who always said he used the “drip” before Jackson Pollock) was lamenting the loss of yet another young painter to printmaking”. It would be years before Bill would move away from painting with a brush in spite of what he uttered that day at ASU. “Serigraphy didn’t give me the scale I was looking for, so acrylic paint on canvas remained my primary mode of expression, with newspaper clippings sometimes affixed to the surface along with words or text painted by hand”. Work with early paintboxes had given Bill the experience of using a digitizing tablet and pen and he has carried that over to even his laptop.
“This is so like a pencil, I can draw easily with it, so much so that I came to see my computer as just that, a very complex pencil. Gradually, I began to see that working digitally was increasingly satisfying my need for self-expression. Often the end-result image was as gratifying as anything I created using more traditional fine art media, but the television screen was too restrictive, and though I could print the images using any handy computer printer, they were also too small for conveying adequate gravitas”.
The introduction of plotters solved this problem. Now more correctly called “large scale printers”, early plotters were expensive, but through Bill’s prodding (begging) and repeated attention drawn to how much money could be saved every time the station had to pay a third party to print large scale images, WSFA’s chief engineer purchased a 24” HP plotter. “The first image I test printed on a plotter was naturally one of my own – and I was transported back to that day in the studio at ASU – an epiphany!”
On this day, Bill resolved to purchase his own plotter and in less than a year, he had his own 42” HP large-scale printer. “I wanted a 60 lsp," but couldn’t afford it, but the one I bought does manage to give me close to the scale I like.”
This show, Icons, Avatars and Archetypes, is the result of this thirty-year sojourn. From that first (and ironically last), silk-screened image, Diana, to CBR, this collection shows the evolution and maturation of an artist. “I think of Dr. Britt and wonder what he would think of my embrace of the computer as just another medium. I like to think that even though he might be slow to warm to the notion, ultimately he would realize this is only an evolution; that all the long established elements of design and aesthetic sensibility are still intact and applicable. My hand is clearly visible and my skill is brought to bear just as readily as in any other media I’ve worked with”.
“I consider myself to be not much different from fellow Montgomery native Mose T. Like him, I used the tools and elements of my environment and applied them to my oeuvre, because I needed to express myself. Once I started printing on canvas, the die was set for me. I call them printings, because they’re a cross between prints and paintings”.
Heavily influenced by Andy Warhol, several of these images are of Bill’s MySpace friends. “It is interesting to me that the Internet is at once intimate and remote – I have “friends” that I actually don’t know, but somehow feel as though I do. Whereas in the past we artists chose from our environment some paramour or crush to serve as muse, I have the entire globe to choose from!”
Bill is single, has a lovely daughter and an eight-year old grandson. He spends his down time reading, playing Scrabble and following college sports. |
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