Category: Process

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.

The Small Potato Manifesto—May not Read but I Identify

Book cover, for a book titled Creative Not Famous, The Small Potato Manifesto
Potato Manifesto, Author Ayun Halliday

I’ve got this theory that the giant majority—like 99.9% of all humans toiling creatively—are small potatoes. We’ll never be rich. We’ll never be famous … nowhere near as famous as we should be. Yet, we struggle on, undeterred that most of the world considers us to be small potatoes … if they consider us at all.
       ~ Ayun Halliday’s, Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto

Keep on Truckin' an image inspired bya song by The Temptations 1973
Keep on Truckin’. It’s an image inspired by a song with the same title.

I guess we “Keep On Truckin’.”

 

 

Dyslexia is not a disability – it’s a gift.

From the series, Words I Cannot Spell. A image by Bill Hendricks
From the suite images by Bill Hendricks, “Words That I Cannot Spell.”

Dyslexia is not a disability – it’s a gift. It means that I, and many other dyslexic thinkers can portray the world through images because we think in images. I can build worlds, freeze the frame, walk around and touch. I can read people’s faces, drawings, buildings, landscapes and all things in the visual world more quickly than many of my non-dyslexic friends. I paint with words; they are my colours.
~ Sally Gardner (Davis Dyslexia Association International)

Growing up, I had no idea why I had such a hard time reading and comprehending what I read. In my day, elementary school classes would divide the classes readers into three or four groups in the early grades: good, so-so, and poor. I always wanted to be in a good reader’s group but always found myself in the poor group with a good reader (a classmate) as our tutor. I never knew why I was having such a horrible time reading things I wanted to read.
It was not until I joined the USAF found that I was dyslexic. Reading is still a struggle, but I, too, believe as Sally Gardner believes. Those of us who have dyslexia have the opportunity to see the world differently. Personally, I think that dyslexia contributed to my ability to express myself through art and other endeavors that required creativity while solving problems.
I included Sally Gardner’s poem, Disobeys Me, with my suite of images in the gallery named Words that I Cannot Spell, which I believe strikes a cord that many with dyslexia identify.
I want to thank Hunt and Gather Antiques for allowing me to photograph the incredible collection of letters in their backlot.

One Sketch; Two Paths

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Heraclitus

One Sketch; Two Paths was an exploration using two different approaches and two different media, as Bill Hendricks worked on them simultaneously.
One Sketch; Two Paths

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.“