Tag: MCAD

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.

Beginning Again

The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
— Chinese Proverb

Creativity at Work
Title: October 11, 2022, 7:57 pm, Digitally Enhanced Photo, Hendricks © 2022
October 11, 2022, 7:57 pm, Digitally Enhanced Photo, Hendricks ©2022

Yes, I am beginning again. Roughly a year and a half ago, my blog of 12 years was shut down by Blue Host because it was infected with malware. I mourned. It had over two thousand images taken or created by me. Hundreds of quotes I found meaningful and helped center my meditation.

After talking to former colleagues at Minneapolis College (MCTC), I found a new host and came to WordPress. com. They offered security to me and any readers coming to ArtChangesLives(Dot)Com at a reasonable price.

In the past posts that were saved and brought back, you will find lines of code that refer to images that once resided there. I decided to keep them there for references for myself. I hope you don’t see this confusing.

My pseudonym for Second Life activities is Tap Quentin. I named my Avatar after my first boyhood crush, Bobby Quinn. I just completed uploading many of my works to Second Life’s Marketplace. I invite you to view my works at my online store, Ephemeral Traces.

Information about Bill Hendricks (Shadowmason)

About Me… William John Hendricks

I am what I amAnd what I am needs no excusesI deal my own deckSometimes the ace sometimes the deuces. 
~ Jerry Herman, Composer (Wikipedia)

Bill Hendricks, (Shadowmason)
Bill Hendricks, 2021, in my office at Minneapolis College.

I’m a Minnesotan who has spent much of my life between Los Angeles and New York City. I consider myself a digital artist, but my work moves between tactile and virtual forms — printmaking, photography, drawing, and interactive installations.

My work has been shown in Minneapolis and New York and is held in several private collections throughout the United States. It has been exhibited in The Intimate Gallery at Gallery 148 in Minneapolis — a group show that explored the idea of collective consciousness — and in Postcards From the Edge, presented by Visual AIDSAttachment.tiff at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City.

My digital work has also been archived by Rhizome ArtBaseAttachment.tiff, where my interactive piece Interpreted, Obscured and Sought (2005) is featured. Rhizome’s collection focuses on pioneering internet-based art, and being included there connects my work to a larger history of experimental digital practice.

For over two decades, I taught Graphic Design, Web Design, and Fine Art at Minneapolis College (MCTC) and also taught at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), where I earned my MFA. Teaching shaped how I think about art — as a dialogue between thought, feeling, and craft.

After retiring, I returned full circle to my studio practice, creating new work that blends ink drawing, photography, and 3D modeling. I continue to explore how the digital and the handmade can meet — how systems and structures can hold emotion and spirit.

My work also appears in Second Life, where I exhibit under the name Tap Quentin. In January, I was invited by the Second Life Endowment for the Arts to participate in a group show featuring digital prints and drawings. You can view some of my virtual work on the Second Life Marketplace at Ephemeral TracesAttachment.tiff.

Learn more about my current projects and reflections in the 2025 Mixed Media GalleryAttachment.tiff — where I continue to explore the quiet space between order and intuition, stillness and play.

Moving Forward

“The Shadow as a Metaphor for Power” is in and I am officially done with my degree. You can get a copy of the thesis on my Portfolio page and follow the links.

I am not going to complain about how busy I’ve been but I have. I’ve accomplished a lot. The studio is in good shape too. I’ve applied for a grant to study the post modern critique. In short, it will be looking at overcoming built-in prejudges between the generations. I will post more about the topic soon. Frenchy Lunning was a big help as I worked to narrow focus.