Profile
Bill Morales studied painting and drawing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Boston University, where he received an MFA degree in Painting. Since then he has exhibited his paintings nationally, including two solo exhibitions at the Bowery Gallery in NYC, as well as numerous group and juried exhibitions. Originally from Los Angeles, he now resides near Half Moon Bay on the central California coast after stints in Santa Cruz, Boston, New York, and Oregon. Since 1992 he has been teaching painting and drawing at Cañada College in Redwood City.
“I have always had a love for drawing and painting people. Over the years the subject matter of my paintings has included portraiture, bathers on the seashore, and narrative images of childhood. Since 2004, I have concentrated on depicting the female nude. Through likeness and gesture, I try to get something of personality or character of my sitter. However, I am most interested in expressing the sensuality and feminine beauty of the subject. Light and space are crucial elements in this endeavor. I attempt to convey these qualities primarily through color, the painted surface, and the rhythm of form.”
“Drawing is central to my work, now more than ever. I prefer to use charcoal because of its simplicity and responsiveness as a medium. It allows me to approach the subject analytically, on the one extreme, or completely intuitively at the other. The gouache paintings and the pastel drawings are two different routes by which I can combine different aspects of drawing and painting. The gouaches are all done from life while the pastels are usually done from photographs.”
“I go back and forth between working from life, working from my imagination, and using drawings and photographs as source material. Because I tend to use the same model over and over, I find that working from photos or sketches of the model is possible. There is a familiarity and understanding of form gained through repeated study and this informs my reading of these secondary sources.”