I was walking today, thinking about how things have happened in my life. So much wasn’t planned. Things came along, I stepped into them, and before I knew it, I was doing it for better or worse.
Looking back, I’m amazed at how things worked out. But they weren’t always glory days. I didn’t always know where I was going or whether things would work out.
I kept doing it while making course corrections along the way. Now I’m spending more time thinking about what comes next, but I’m already doing what I want to do.
I’ve been noticing something similar in my drawings. Working with pen and ink makes me slow down. Every line matters. I have to look at what’s happening, think about what I’m doing, and decide where the next line goes.
It challenges me.
Maybe that’s why being present came to mind today. Whether I’m drawing or walking, there’s something about paying attention to what’s happening around me. I guess that is called presence.
I have confidence in sunshine,
I have confidence in rain.
I have confidence that spring will come again!
Besides which, you see, I have confidence in me!
When I was teaching, my students used to get a kick out of the fact that every once in a while I would break into song.
One of my favorites was I Have Confidence from The Sound of Music.
I’ve been thinking about that song lately. I’ve also been thinking about confidence, trust, and résumés.
A résumé can list what I’ve done. It can remind me of exhibitions, teaching, projects, and accomplishments. But confidence doesn’t come from a list of what I’ve already done.
It comes from trusting what I can do next.
I’ve been working on a new series of small drawings and paintings, and I’m pleased to say that some of them will be going to New York in December for Collective Z’s Small Works show.
I’m excited to be showing with Collective Z again. It’s a wonderful small gallery, and I’ve really enjoyed working with Alex Z. Wang.
Will every piece I make be the best piece I’ve ever made? Probably not.
That’s not really the point.
Whatever comes out of that process, it will be the best of me.
Bill Hendricks
Three works in progress from the Small Works series, 2026. Pen and ink on paper.
Collective Z is a contemporary gallery and project space on Broome Street in New York, dedicated to artists working in states of transition, tension, and becoming.
I find myself reminiscing about the past more often these days.
I think about Christopher Street and the wonderful life that was lived there. I think about the friends I made, and the friends who became family, during one of the most intense periods in LGBTQ+ history—the AIDS epidemic.
So many of those friends are gone now.
But I still think about them. I remember them. And I think about the wonderful life I have had, and the life I am still having, and how much fun it would have been to share some of this life with them.
Maybe that has something to do with how Marsha P. came into being.
The original abstract drawing—the first stage of what became Marsha P.An early stage, as I explored tinting beneath the drawing and bringing areas back.A middle stage of the drawing, as the eyes, smile, and surrounding colors became more defined.Marsha P. — finished mixed-media drawing by Bill Hendricks, 2025.
The drawing did not begin as Marsha P. Johnson.
I know that.
It began as a very abstract sort of image. I was working with shapes and lines without any intention of making a portrait.
Then I began to see something.
First I saw the smile.
At this point, I was exploring how to tint underneath the drawing—putting color down and then bringing areas back.
As I worked, I began to see the eyes.
And all along there was a certain joy in the drawing that kept coming through.
I continued drawing, painting, changing things, covering things, uncovering things. The more I worked, the more something from my own history seemed to be coming forward.
My past became present.
Marsha was part of the world I remember.
I don’t mean that Marsha and I were close friends. We weren’t.
She was someone who passed through my life.
But she was a character on Christopher Street, just as I was a character on Christopher Street—working in a gallery among lots of other characters I loved dearly.
There was something about seeing her emerge from this drawing that gave me a way of becoming involved with that world again.
Not simply remembering it.
Participating in it.
For a little while, the distance between then and now became smaller.
The finished work became Marsha P.
For me, it carries more than the image of one person. It carries something of Christopher Street, of friendship, of loss, of survival, and of the extraordinary joy that existed alongside some very difficult years.
Maybe that is why the joy in the drawing matters so much to me.
The work later traveled to New York, where it was exhibited during Pride Month. The original Marsha P. is now available through Collective Z Gallery on Artsy.
But when I look at it, that isn’t what I think about first.
I think about the people.
I think about the life we lived.
Sometimes, while making a drawing, the past finds its way back into the room.
Currently at Collective Z
Collective Z is currently presenting Second Nature, bringing together painters Gwen Yip and Spencer Patrick. Their work considers the spaces New Yorkers move through—from the public world of subway platforms to the private interiors where people retreat.
Second Nature is on view through August 29, 2026, at Collective Z, 325 Broome Street, New York.
In 1969, I remember hearing about Stonewall late one night on KDWB radio. They were interviewing Jack Baker.
I was sixteen years old.
For the first time, I realized there were others. I wasn’t alone.
Looking back now, I realize that moment wasn’t just about being gay. It was the beginning of a lifelong search for direction—for understanding how people find their place in the world and how we make sense of lives that don’t always fit the expected path.
I’ve spent much of my life looking for paths.
Sometimes those paths appeared as maps. Sometimes as diagrams. Sometimes as outlines, websites, or decision trees. Often they appeared simply as ways of organizing what I could see—and finding relationships among things that did not, at first, seem connected.
As a teacher, I spent years making outlines, building websites, drawing wireframes, and thinking in mind maps. I taught Gestalt theory—the idea that our minds naturally seek relationships and organize visual information into meaningful wholes.
Being dyslexic, I think I was already doing that long before I knew there was a name for it.
I’ve often described myself as someone who sees patterns. And I still believe that’s true.
But during one of my daily walks, another thought quietly surfaced.
Maybe what has fascinated me all these years hasn’t been patterns themselves.
Maybe it’s been finding my way.
Patterns are useful because they reveal possible paths. Maps matter because they help us navigate. Even a labyrinth has a pattern—but its purpose isn’t the pattern itself. Its purpose is to help us travel and find ourselves.
That realization feels surprisingly important.
When I look back over my life—from hearing Jack Baker on the radio… to teaching students how we make sense of the world… to designing websites… to creating art… to exploring identity, community, and spirit—I don’t see disconnected experiences anymore.
I see one long journey.
The maps changed.
The questions changed.
The medium changed.
But the journey remained remarkably consistent.
Lately I’ve started calling some of my drawings Decision Trees.
At first I thought they were simply abstract compositions.
Now I wonder if they’re visual journals.
They resemble the maps, outlines, webs, and structures I have used throughout my life—not because I planned them that way, but because they’ve always been part of how I think.
Related post: This reflection continues the ideas I began exploring in Looking Back, Looking Forward, where I considered how patterns can help us find our way.
Video:Looking Back, Looking Forward. A sequence of Bill Hendricks’s line drawings explores maps, branching paths, and emerging patterns. Music accompanies the images, along with a message.
Maps, patterns, and finding my way
During one of my daily walks, I realized something had been quietly growing over the past few weeks.
Looking back over my life, I see a thread I hadn’t fully recognized before.
As a teacher, I wasn’t really teaching maps. I was teaching how people think. Gestalt theory, visual relationships, organizing information, recognizing connections—those ideas found their way into almost everything I taught. Site maps, mind maps, color wheels, design systems… they were never just tools. They were ways of seeing.
Now I’m beginning to notice those same patterns emerging in my artwork.
The drawings began as what I called Decision Trees. Each branch suggested another possibility, another choice, another path.
But lately I’ve started wondering if they’re about something else.
Maybe they aren’t about making decisions.
Maybe they’re about recognizing patterns.
When life becomes uncertain, my instinct is to search for a new direction. Yet I’m beginning to wonder if the path is already there, waiting to be recognized. Perhaps finding our way isn’t about inventing something new. Perhaps it’s about noticing the connections that have been quietly leading us all along.
That thought has stayed with me.
It has even changed the way I look at these drawings. They no longer feel like illustrations of an idea. They feel like evidence of a conversation I’ve been having with myself without realizing it.
I don’t know exactly where this series is going.
That’s the exciting part.
For the first time in a while, I don’t feel like I’m forcing the work toward an answer. I’m simply paying attention to where it wants to lead.
Maybe that’s what artists do.
Maybe that’s what all of us do.
We keep looking back, not to live in the past, but to recognize the patterns that help us move forward.
“Humans are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. We look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives.”
