Category: Minneapolis College of Art Design

Art Re-Education Revisited

I’ve been thinking about that phrase.

A few years ago, while attending Friends General Conference, I took a Zentangle workshop. Part of my interest was practical. As a teacher, I was always looking for things I could bring back to my students. At the same time, I was doing some spiritual searching of my own.

When I retired, my intention was simple. I thought I would return to the work I had left behind years earlier when I completed my MFA. While teaching, my focus had been on technology, my students, and teaching itself. I assumed I would pick up where my thesis left off and continue from there.

I did return to my thesis and to its central ideas: how perception and physiology affect our vision of reality.

What I discovered, however, was that too much had changed. The media I was working with had changed. My interests had changed. Instead of continuing where I left off, I found myself asking some of the same questions I had wrestled with in graduate school.

What is my art about?

What am I trying to say?

And what medium is best suited to saying it?

At some point, I began to wonder if I was engaged in a kind of re-education.

Looking back at those early pieces now, I can see that many of them focused on value, texture, repetition, and mark-making. At the time, I didn’t really realize what I was exploring, but now they feel a bit like exercises in learning how to see and do again. To me, that’s my art re-education.

What I do know is that one thing kept leading to another.

A drawing would spark an idea for the next drawing, and little by little my curiosity carried me beyond the boundaries of Zentangle itself. Questions about line and pattern turned into questions about color, surface, and different ways to make marks.

Before I knew it, ink led to watercolor, watercolor led to gouache, gouache led to colored pencil, digital work, and eventually oil paint.

The recent exhibition at Collective Z feels like a milestone along that path. With the show entering its final week, I’ve found myself taking a breath and wondering what comes next.

And perhaps that’s the point: I’m still asking questions.

I’m not sure where the path leads from here, but I’m still eager to follow it.

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

— Paul Klee

What’s Bill Hendricks Been Doing?

My Sketchbooks, Hard Drives, and Blog are my Diaries.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary”
~ Pablo Picasso

Six weeks is a long time away from my blog, and hope other artists will want to post on ArtChangeslives(Dot)Com to share their art and experiences of how art has changed their lives.

I put together a collage of images of my work. After working with Blender for a couple of years, uploading some of my Blender 3D objects into Second Life, and earning a couple of grants, I see a path of combining some of my tactile work with my 3D work to produce sort of a hybrid work works for the Metaverse and conventional viewing. Mainly, it involves the viewer,  akin to working in a more traditional gallery or exhibition hall. 

In grad school (MCAD), I produced several installations, and I was attracted to the participatory nature and how visitors could interact with them. Kara Walker and other artists engaged the visitor by incorporating the viewers’ shadow into the work, creating a relationship to the work that mere viewing does not necessarily achieve.

So, in the past few weeks, I have not created work that has been completed, which I normally post. I was also concerned about posting work that was not completed. I found that it kind of destroys the Ta-da moment. Hmm… I wonder how important that might be.

I am on my way to completing a project in Blender/Second Life. It is a simply built house that will be used in Second Life as a skybox. A skybox is a floating home on a parcel of digital space. The house is pictured in the image below, and you can see the documentation and the progression of the build here: Learning Blender Better. In short, I chose to produce a simple building to learn and become more proficient. 

I am finding that blogging is important to me ArtChangesLives(Dot)Com is over and is approaching its 20th year. I struggle with openly revealing myself here, but as I said earlier, my sketchbooks, hard drives, and blog are my diaries. It seems Picasso had his own diaries-one being his paintings. 

The image contains a smattering of artistic investigations. It shows a collection of recent work, including ink drawings and digital images created in Affinity Photo and Designer, watercolor, and Blender.
An Exploration of Artistic Techniques and Combinations of Media.

Looking at a blank canvas.

I’m starting a new drawing that seems to resemble currency.

A drawing begins
0718 – 2023-dollarbill, Hendricks©2023
Looking at a Blank Canvas

Lately, thank goodness, that is not a problem at the moment. I am working between two, probably multiple. This one promises to be fun. Trust me, I have had those moments. What to do?
Do something else if you are stuck. Yes, it distracts you and lets your brain refresh. The new else might help the old else find a solution.
One of our students at MCTC(Minneapolis College) was in a class my mentor and friend, Felix Ampah, taught. I was told the student sat in front of a canvas, and Felix went over and asked if something was wrong. The student blurted out, “I don’t want to ruin it.”
Felix Ahpah asked to have her brush. He took it and made a swash on the canvas, probably not big. Gave his wonderful smile that beamed and said, “Now it is ruined.” Then smiled, and they laughed, and he moved on.“

An Echo, a Shadow, Nothingness…Whoa!

In order to experience a poem, we must understand it; in order to understand it; we must hear it, see it, contemplate it—convert it into an echo, a shadow, nothingness. Comprehension is a spiritual exercise.

Octavio Paz,
Alternating Current, p. 49

wp-content/uploads/2021/03/

Floating through Space and Time
Floating through Space and Time,  Mixed-media,  Hendricks@2023

I don’t think I am creating anything as profound as Paz describes, but as I said many times in this blog—I am on a path, which is not totally visible to me. I get glimpses, but never too sure what I see.
I do want to say that just because I post works of art, I do not think they are grand, that the technique is refined, or the lines sure and sharp. I know they are not. However, as I do and study my ideas, my voice and path will clarify.
There is one thing I want readers and friends to know, and that is that I believe in a power greater than ourselves, and there is a piece, a bit, of that power, that Light within each of us. I don’t know if I am a theist, non-theist, pantheist, or panentheist. Whatever I am, I seek to reach, connect, and engage with that Light that exists within me… and you. I am saying this partly because I have avoided saying it in the public eye of art critics and peers.
OH MY GOD! I just came out again.  😆

About William (Bill) Hendricks — Artist, Shadowmason, and Tap Quentin

My name is William John Hendricks, and I work professionally as Bill Hendricks. I am a Minneapolis-based artist and retired art and design educator. My work moves between drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, digital media, 3D modeling, interactive installations, and virtual environments.

Bill Hendricks, also known as Shadowmason
Bill Hendricks, 2021, in my office at Minneapolis College.

I have also created and exhibited digital work under two established identities:

  • Shadowmason is my longtime online and digital-art identity, including my work on ArtChangesLives.com.
  • Tap Quentin is the name I use for my artwork and exhibitions in the virtual world Second Life.

These names represent different periods and settings within one artistic life. Shadowmason and Tap Quentin are both parts of my history as William “Bill” Hendricks.

Artistic Practice

My work moves between tactile and virtual forms. I am interested in what happens when the handmade and the digital meet—when systems and structures become containers for emotion, imagination, and spirit.

After retiring from teaching, I returned fully to my studio practice. My recent work includes watercolor, gouache, ink drawing, photography, mixed media, and digital modeling. Across these forms, my work moves between observation, memory, and imagination.

Memory has become increasingly important in my recent work. I lived in New York City during the 1980s and into the 1990s, where I worked at All State Art, Circle’s TR Gallery, and Desired Printing. I was part of the gay community during the AIDS epidemic. My memories of Christopher Street—of friendship, loss, survival, and the extraordinary creativity and joy of that period—continue to enter my work today.

Exhibitions and Collections

My work has been exhibited in Minneapolis and New York and is held in private collections throughout the United States.

My exhibitions include The Intimate Gallery at Gallery 148 in Minneapolis, a group exhibition exploring collective consciousness, and Postcards From the Edge, presented by Visual AIDS at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City.

In 2026, my work returned to New York through Collective Z Gallery. Marsha P., a work rooted in my memories of Christopher Street and Marsha P. Johnson, was exhibited during Pride Month on the Lower East Side. My work is also represented through Collective Z Gallery on Artsy.

My interactive digital work Interpreted, Obscured and Sought (2005) is archived by Rhizome ArtBase, whose collection documents significant works in the history of internet-based art.

Teaching and Education

I earned my MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). For more than two decades, I taught Graphic Design, Web Design, and Fine Art at Minneapolis College, formerly Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC). I also taught at MCAD.

Teaching shaped my understanding of art as a continuing conversation among thought, feeling, experimentation, and craft.

Virtual and Digital Work

In Second Life, I exhibit as Tap Quentin. My virtual projects include digital prints, drawings, constructed environments, and work presented through Ephemeral Traces.

The name Shadowmason connects my earlier internet-based work, my digital practice, and the history of ArtChangesLives.com. Shadowmason and Tap Quentin are not separate people or disconnected identities; they are parts of my broader artistic history.

Current Work

I continue to make art and write from Minneapolis. ArtChangesLives.com brings together my studio work, photographs, digital experiments, reflections, and observations about how art shapes the way we understand our lives, relationships, and communities.