Bill Brody
Printmaking|Digital Art|Oil|Acrylic
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Description
The measure of art is how successful it is as an agent to alter and enrich the viewer's capacity to experience the universe. Art is supposed to cast the scales from your eyes and enable you to see the world anew. It is not about pretty pictures and social climbing. My art is about authentic experience transformed into signs and pathways to encourage experience of a wider and wilder world. Painting in the wilderness has become a significant focus of my artistic life. I’ve been going out into the backcountry of Alaska every year starting in 1989 with the goal of representing something of what it is like to be immersed in that wilderness. My artwork serves as a tool for me to recall those special times. I have taken more than 70 extended trips dedicated to this purpose. In 2018 I relocated to Florida. I continue my committment to working in Alaska's wilderness while embracing the radically different land, sky and waterscape of Florida.
I found out I enjoyed teaching printmaking as an undergraduate mathematics student in 1963. I received a Masters of Fine Arts with a major in painting and a minor in printmaking from Claremont Graduate in 1967. Since then I taught full time at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks 1967-69; 1977-2000, retiring as professor emeritus. During my tenure in Alaska I taught printmaking, design, drawing and developed a computer art curriculum. From 1970-75 I taught art history drawing design and printmaking at Ripon College. In 1983/84 I took a sabbatical in computer graphics and taught printmaking at Scripps College. In 1990/91 I took a sabbatical and taught printmaking computer art and art history. From 1996-2006 I worked with the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center as a user interface specialist in virtual reality as Co creator of BLUI (body language user interface) an interactive application for creating sculpture in virtual reality with rapid prototyping output.
In 1989 I started going into the wilderness to paint on location and have continued the practice. I usually spend 2 two week long periods in extreme wilderness locations far from roads or trails, often entirely alone, doing nothing but being witness to the places I visit. I’ve visited something more than 70 such wild places, mostly in Alaska but also the Everglades here in Florida, Yamal Nenets Autonomous Region in north western Siberia, the Isle of Skye in Scotland, the Loxahatchee and Indian Rivers in Florida. The most unusual locations have been camped out on snow in the high mountains of Alaska. In 2014 I taught a plein air painting class along the Yukon River that started out with gathering willow to make charcoal to use for sketching and as black pigment. It would be fun to develop a local plein air class that started the same way and went out into the wilder or at least more natural local areas.