| Artist's Statement
After traveling around the world most of childhood as an Army brat until his family settled for good in the Costa Mesa / Newport Beach area. Bill Wray began working in the animation business as a teen-ager in the Seventies. Being mostly self-taught and shunning California’s conceptual oriented art schools, he eventually enrolled in The Art Students League in the eighties located in New York to reinforce his spotty art foundation. After deciding the fine art world was to conceptual for the kind of representational work he wanted to do, he went into commercial art.
Bill went on to work in writing and drawing comic books, animation and illustration. He is well known for his painting style on the Ren and Stimpy Show, his work in Mad Magazine and his collaborations with Mike Mignola on Hellboy Jr.
Bill is currently concentrating hard on fine art oil painting centering in on urban landscape work. For the last two years Bill has been a member of LPAPA, Oil painters of America and the California art club and has had workshops with Ray Roberts, Carolyn Anderson, Matt Smith, Eric Merrill, Frank Serrano, George Strickland and long term study with Jove Wang.
He’s currently showing with Segil Fine Art in Monrovia and M. J. Higgins in Downtown Los Angeles. An upcoming show will be at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in December 2008. His awards include the artist choice award at the 2006 SLO painting Festival and honorable mention at the LAPAPA 2008 Best of Plein Air.
Bill resides in Sierra Madre, California with his significant other Sharon and his linguist-gifted parrot Mooky.
Website: http://williamwray.blogspot.com/ |
