Conversations with Bill Mayer

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bill Mayer.

Bill, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’m not sure these questions really uncover my journey as an artist, a chronic scribbler. I’ve always loved drawing, painting, and playing with materials. It didn’t start when I went to art school. It started when I was born. It’s wonderful to find something that you’re so in touch with that it feels intuitive, second nature. It’s even better when you can find a way to make a living doing that. I think art is a way of life, not just an occupation. My elementary school teachers would often opine in my report cards that all I wanted to do was draw. They set me by the window and let me draw pictures, maybe they thought photosynthesis would help my little brain but it just offered more inspiration.

In my early life, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. From there, we moved to Memphis, Tennessee. I remember my mother picking grass out of Elvis’s yard and sending it back to her friends in Alabama. He lived there at the time. It was the late 50s. From there we moved to New York and got a big dose of snow and Yankee friendliness. I think in New York we thought we were Indians. We dug holes to China, we made forts in the trees, ran wild on the golf course, shot arrows into the air and played chicken. If you moved you lost.

Around the early 60s we moved back south, to the Atlanta area. My parents bought a house in Decatur off Columbia Drive. We’d spend our time harassing the cows and bulls at the local dairy farm just a short walk away. At the age of 17 I went away to Art School. Ringling School of Art. It’s where I met my wife, Lee, I think during the first month of school. We met at a dance. We’ve kind of been joined at the hip ever since. We lived together for three years at Ringling and got married just before graduation.

Ringling was a great school for us. It had a strong foundation program and taught you how to paint and draw. What it lacked in specialized business-oriented learning wasn’t hard to pick up. Most of it is common sense anyway. From ringing I worked at a few studios around Atlanta. Graphics Group, Whole Hog Studios… I certainly got some business context at the studios. I learned how thumbnails and sketches worked for things that needed to get approval before you finished the art.
At art school I had always done the finished painting, and then gone back and did sketches and thumbnails because they were required.

The other thing I learned at the studio was through watching other people come up with ideas with annuals open on their lap. They could take an idea from one place and a technique from another and kind of mash them into what they were considering to be original. To get away from this, I stopped looking at annuals and other people’s work and just started drawing the way I draw, painting the way I paint, with my own ideas and colors. Magically, my work started to look like my own. Maybe not so magically. If you don’t emulate others, then your work tends to have its own feeling.

I always experimented with mediums and techniques. A lot of the joy I get is with experimenting with new techniques and then finding ways to apply those to new projects that come up. Certainly it can push concepts farther.

Over the years, and I guess there have been quite a few of them now, I’ve explored different techniques and looks for my illustrations. I think that has helped me remain fairly timeless. During the 70s and early 80s I worked a lot with loose pencil and watercolor, humorous illustrations. In the mid 80s I started doing more stylized airbrush work, still in a humorous direction. Lately I’ve been doing a lot more gouache paintings, in a more realistic and dark direction. I’ve always been drawn to the darker side, so it didn’t take much to push me in that direction. Even my sense of humor is ironic. And the concepts that sometimes were very funny when done in a conceptual drawing style can seem rather horrifying when done realistically. Well, none of them are really horrifying. They’re kind of dark.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Sometimes it’s hard to write a rational explanation for work you’ve done over the years, when I really can’t remember my name. In fact, right now all I can think about is precariously hanging 150 feet up in the air while rock climbing in the Gunks. I’m run out 20 feet above my last marginal nut. My wife Lee on belay, my friend Mike, camera ready to capture my bones punching through my chest as I deck, and the most I can think of is where’s that No. 4 quad. Climbing for me became a great escape from being captive in the studio. Not that I don’t love the work; I do. But being outside on a beautiful cliff face looking down at the valley, it is easy to leave demanding clients behind.

I love my work, I love playing with the materials. I love that crazy tactile therapy. It’s strange to me. Sometimes the process of painting spills in so much of its own momentum that I scarcely remember working on it. It’s like someone else in control. It’s like a previous life experience, which seems impossible for me as I am convinced in my past life I was a dog in a pound awaiting euthanasia. Some people believe it’s luck, but I happen to know it was actually the Voodoo lady I saw in New Orleans in 1984 who beat me relentlessly with a bouquet of white flowers.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I have always been drawn to the odd and strange. We live in an old Victorian house in Decatur, Georgia. It’s filled with an eclectic collection of dead things and artifacts. My wife Lee and I have been collecting from the time we met at art school. There used to be a strange little shop in New York on 31st street between 6th and 7th ave; it was a glass eye sales and taxidermy rental store. On one side, cases of eyes staring out at you, and on the other, two-headed cows and animated stuffed kittens playing instruments. And near Mexico Beach, Florida there was a place called “Rocky’s Indian Museum.” Side show freaks and siamese twin dummies. Nazi war villains lined up in coffins, and a mummified Indian laid out on the table… shrunken heads hanging from a bar in the broken juke box…We’ve always been drawn to that carnival freak show atmosphere.

Ive done it all, magazines, advertising and editorial illustration, children’s books and book covers, US Postal Stamps, theater and movie posters, board games, Whisky labels, candy and snack packaging, and everything in between.
I think I’m constantly trying to explore, experiment, and come up with different directions and ideas. I try to play with the medium, sometimes disregarding the traditional ways that it’s typically handled. Sometimes some of the most rewarding accidents come from this. Lately I’ve been working a lot in gouache, it’s sort of become my medium of choice for the time being. It’s a challenging medium that has taken some time to work with and perfect.

For me personally, a great illustration comes from an uninterrupted creative process that allows you to move fluidly from idea to sketch to final. I tend to get more enjoyment from working on personal pieces than commissioned work. I think it’s that sense of play that keeps you enjoying your work.
I think I’ve always been drawn to the tactile elements of art, working with paper, inks, pens. It’s the physical and mental therapy that has probably kept me out of jail. My sketchbooks are my therapists, and I try not to hold back. I have two rules, never rip out a page, and no more sex drawings. OK, I always break that second rule…

The characters that consistently get a lot of fan mail and attention are the “Jazz Cat” Illustrations from Smooth Jazz band “The Rippingtons” Album Covers, as well as the original illustrations of Baseball players for “Big League Chew.” I think people really remember those sorts of classic images fondly. Always fun to look back on those types of branding illustrations, like the monsters on the old foot-long Laffy Taffys.

What are your plans for the future?
I published a little book of sketchbook drawings a few years ago and it got me thinking about more releases. The next book we ran a kickstarter campaign for funding and it’s with the printers now, we anticipate its delivery this summer. Strange Dreams compiles over 150 of my gouache illustrations in a 9×12 hardbound volume. Pre-Orders are still available at https://www.thebillmayer.com/strange-dreams

I think my first great grandchild has sort of softened the dark edge of my humor and subject matter, has made me think a lot more about doing children’s books (which i’ve done quite a few of in the past) and flowers. Celebrating life and creativity. Maybe feeling a little less cynical.

Lately we’ve been spending a lot of time in the summers at our family cottage in Canada. It’s not fancy, a little family home that Lee’s family built in the early 1900s. The front porch is on a little bay that faces Brighton, Ontario. The back door facing fields and endless trails.

I think I left my soul in an old lighthouse in San Miguel. If you find it I will happily pay for postage to have it returned.
Some advice for young artists: “Be nice to dogs”.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thebillmayer.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebillmayer
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebillmayer

Image Credits
All Art © Bill Mayer.