1975 - 2001 Life Drawing

Bill's formal art education, at both Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Ruskin School of Art, was rooted in the tradition of life drawing. It was a part of his practise which remained throughout his career, and perhaps because of his teaching position at Amherst College in the early 1970s it became the main way he himself taught students in his later years. While Bill's decline due to Alzheimers is most starkly illustrated through his sequence of late self portraits, the change in his abilities is clear in his drawings from 1995 to his final drawing of a head made in 2002. 

Below is a selection from the hundreds of drawings Bill made throughout the years, including some of his final, unfinished, works.