Bill says the fact he is an artist today is due primarily to his art teacher, as a child, in England, but he and the rest of the children all disliked her intensely.

The reason?

She had a rather unusual way of teaching art since she would never allow her students to use an eraser. If they drew something wrong, they drew it again – and again – and again until they finally drew it right the first time.

Like many adults raising a small family, he says he very rarely had any time for recreational art until he was fully retired in 1999. It was then that he put all of the art theory he had been taught as a child into practice.

With some surprise, he discovered if he could see something, he could also paint it and with very high detail.

He feels that, as with many creative people, art and writing tend to go hand in hand. Consequently, over the last five years or so, he has also written about forty short stories and eight novels which he has also illustrated.

Now at 77, he says what he finds most gratifying about his talent is to be able to first create a scene with words and then accurately depict the same scene with paint.

Bill has had a varied career having worked in the British movie industry and has been a policeman, an aircraft mechanic, a merchant seaman, a sign painter, a landscape designer and a newspaper cartoonist. In addition, he has also worked for Air Canada and in the Canadian travel industry as an executive for over thirty years.

He lives in St. Catharines and can be reached at (905) 646-9820.