Carving Wood With Dreams.

Apr 23rd, 2004

by Michael Overa

Fig 1 - © Bill Dilley

    ((Seattle Artist Bill Dilley works eight to twenty hours a day, producing paintings and sculptures. As yet undiscovered, Dilley has won various awards, and continues to work as a full-time artist. Dash30Dash writer Michael Overa spends a day with Bill Dilley. Overa tours Dilley's shop, talks about art, process, and passion. ))

    Most days he's up at his shop by 6:30 in the morning, give or take. He works for three hours, heads back to the house for breakfast, then back to the shop. He works three hours and heads back to the house for lunch. "Sometimes I head back around 10[pm] and I'm there until one, two in the morning. Sometimes it's a twenty hour day," he says with a smile.

    The shop is located on a back corner of his twenty acres, behind fields, cow pastures, peacock coops, forest, and a small pond of trout. It's raining here on Vashon Island, a fifteen minute ferry ride from West Seattle. The forest around his shop is deep green, the mud is deep brown. "I'm not very good at talking about my art" he says as he unlocks the door and turns on the lights. The shop itself is a small warehouse, full of sculptures and various aparatus for casting and carving.

    At one end wood carvings stand near a wall, most of them covered in cloth.
Near a drill press is his current piece, a four foot tall maple carving.

"I cover up the other pieces while I'm working, so they won't influence me." Tacked to the wall are drawings of various live models. "There's a group of us that get together out here with some models," he explains, then points to a sketch on a thick piece of paper "this drawing here was one of the early ideas for this piece."

    The piece he's talking about is similar to his other carvings. Figures are set back in wood, two figures are tangled around each other. A third figure peeks over their shoulders. The wood crowds in around them, like a blanket, or the hazy edges of dreams. He's begun to paint the figures metallic in circles of impasto gold and silver. "It's already taken two gallons of oil." He says, "And I'm not quite done yet." He tells me to feel the wood, smooth with sanding. He points to the deepest creavices and receses of the wood, where he's still working.

Fig 2 © Bill Dilley

    We stand looking at the piece. "I don't tell most people this," he says "But everything I do comes from dreams. I dream it and I draw it."

    From the main shop, with it's concrete floor and high metal ceilings, we retreat into the back corner of the shop. We brush aside a sheet hanging in the doorway and enter a small carpeted room. Paintings lean against the walls. A woodstove is in one corner. There's a desk and a few small castings. One painting is up on an eisel. Bright-yellow orange with thin green worm-tails drifting off the canvas. Most of the paintings here are part of Dilley's recent series of paintings. He calls them the "Worm Paintings" or his "Bio-electrics".

    He points over his shoulder at blank canvases leaning against the wall behind us. "I'm going to move into bigger canvases. I've got some new ideas for some bigger pieces." As we sit in the small room, surrounded by his "Bio-Electrics" and blank canvases he talks about an upcoming show at Gallery 070 on the Island. The show will run for the entire month of June, and although he has a good idea of what he wants to show he knows the gallery's curator has her own opinions. He points out the pieces that he wants to show, and we walk back through his studio.

    We retreat down to the house, warmer and dryer, and Dilley begins to look through his slides and photographs. He pulls out slides and hands them to me, I hold them up to the light. There are slides of paintings, wood sculptures, bronze pieces, stone. A few pictures of him working.

Fig 2 © Bill Dilley

    Some of the photos are from his MFA exhibition at the University of Washington. He explains that a few of the pieces were later displayed at Seattle's 1973 Bumbershoot arts festival. The same pieces now sit back in the woods on his property "gathering moss." Not an odd thought, considering his sulptures are meant to exist in nature.

    The curves and lines of the figures, the forms fit perfectly in natural environments. So perfectly, in fact, that one of his larger pieces was featured in Sunset Magazine's book "Northwest Gardening." Several more pieces sit on his property, by the front gate, in front of the house, out in one of the fields. A bronze horse was recently sold to enthusiastic equestrian.

    Dilley tells stories of his foundry days when he owned a foundry on 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle. He talks about casting lamp stands, and bits and pieces for the Boeing Company. He talks fondly of the biker boys that worked for him.

    He'd started metal work long before those foundry days. He was already working sculpture at 19 while at Central Washington State College in Ellensberg. "I was doing a lot of sculpture, casting. And a lot of glasswork," he says. It was a professor that told him to focus in on one or the other. He chose sculpture. "Glass you have to keep on the end of a rod," he says "you can't manipulate it with your hands. You can't touch it."

    At 54 Dilley is still going strong. "I finished this last piece in about three months," he says, "a few years ago a piece like that would have taken me six months or more." He leans back in his chair, "Most sculptors don't get famous until late in life. I've got plenty of time. Henry Moore didn't get famous until his late 60s." His eyes tell the story of his passion, of working with metal and wood: "I get up there and crank the music, I become a drummer, I can beat it and pound it until my arms give out, which is almost never."