Whether or not you support all the development, no one can deny downtown San Diego is a prospering and lively area. While the long-range wisdom of the choices that have been, and are yet to be made, will continue to be debated, we certainly present a sparkling contrast when measured against the declining downtown areas of many other major U.S. cities. It is the many changes of these past 30 years and their implications for its residents and our way of life that have kept Bill Mosley intrigued.

It’s not as if artists are all that different from the rest of us but they are unique in some very interesting ways. An artist is not likely to argue that something should or should not be done. Their role is not so much that of an activist, either advocate or dissenter. Rather, it is that of a visionary who sees beauty in all things and asks questions. For their ‘job’ is to ask questions and the ‘work’ they do is figuring out an answer. Knowing full well that the answer is incomplete and imperfect, the artist, in order to have any peace, must learn to live comfortably with ambiguity. Bill Mosley is such an artist; an observer, a moral thinker, and an asker of questions. His disposition, interests, education, and plain serendipity have all paved his path.

Artists have their own unique way of seeing things. All artists have that special eye-to-brain-to-hand connection, coupled with a manual dexterity we call a gift for drawing. However, the expression of their real talent is a consequence of hard work. It is much more than being able to paint pretty pictures. Their talent is finding a way to express what they are seeing, or how they are experiencing something, so that we can see it and experience it too. For one thing, it requires time for thoughtful thought and it requires input. Like an actor who has to know how to ride a horse, fight with a sword, sing, dance, even drive a boat for their various rolls, a visual artist must be well versed in many areas relating to their work. They must be naturally observant and curious and their education expands on those qualities.

Bill Mosley has been particularly lucky many times in his life. His father was an ‘idea man’ who was good with his hands. A Navy man, he often brought home fine, small sculptures he’d done while out at sea. As a shipfitter, or metal smith, he could make or fix anything and they often worked on projects together around their home. His mother, the ‘brains’ in the family, had faith in his integrity and always encouraged Bill to follow his heart. His high school art teacher, Enid Miller, decided he was harmless the day she walked into her classroom and found him standing on his head in the middle of her desk. She recognized his talent and his unique way of expressing himself and gave him confidence in his own ideas and solutions by assuring him that what he was doing was interesting and encouraging him to follow his intuition no matter what direction it took. Her classroom was the only place he could completely and freely express himself and his sense of humor. Her classes challenged him and he eagerly worked hard to come up with solutions. It was the beginning of many enriching teacher-student relationships Bill has been fortunate to have in his life.

Many artists complain about art education being too structured and confining to provide the encouragement and confidence artists need in the crucial beginning of their careers. Some artists simply drop out of school and prefer to consider themselves ‘self-taught’. Bill’s experience was exactly the opposite and he always knew he wanted to teach. He began as a part-time instructor teaching painting at Southwestern College and for the past ten years, he has been teaching drawing, painting, and design at Grossmont College. He has just recently won a full-time position as Art Instructor for painting and drawing as well as the very new ‘digital painting’ at Grossmont College. Bill considers the many empowering relationships he has enjoyed over the years, first with his own teachers and then with his fellow teachers, an important part of his experience as an artist and an enriching aspect of his life.

At 18, Bill took one semester off from his studies at Southwestern College to help his parents move to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, not realizing that it would instantly change his draft status to 1A. Suddenly, enlistment in the Army looked like a better opportunity than being drafted and almost surely going to Viet Nam. Signing up for three years, instead of being drafted for two, he was able to choose where he would spend the first year. He figured it was a good idea to buy himself some time so he enlisted and chose Germany. Once again, his luck held and he spent the next three years in Germany as a Personnel Specialist training troops.

When Bill left the Army in 1970, he was eligible for the GI Bill and he used it to complete his college education. He spent one year at San Diego State University where he focused on abstraction and was able to make some animated films. Patricia Patterson, an instructor at UCSD, was impressed with his films, showed them to Manny Farber, and persuaded him to take Bill as a student. At the time, Farber and Patterson were bringing a strong influence of narrative and representational art to what was a unique time at UCSD, filled with experimental work being done by good people. For Bill, it was a microcosm in time filled with energy and stimulus surrounded by great teachers who were always helpful and encouraging. Bill particularly remembers Manny Farber’s one sentence answers as they were always worth remembering and traces of Patricia Patterson’s figurative work and the painterly qualities of her brush strokes can be seen in Bill’s work today. The experience taught him how to think and paint outside the box.

As an MFA student at UCSD, Bill assisted and collaborated with UCSD professors emeriti, Newton and Helen Harrison, on many of their projects dealing with ecological and sociological concerns. Like the Harrisons, Bill became aware of the negative consequences of poor or too rapid city planning and began using photography to capture the alterations of his surroundings. While the Harrisons primarily reveal their ideas and concerns through videos, performance, catalogs, and interviews, Bill sees the landscape through the eyes of a painter.

In the early 80’s, Bill began painting his view of downtown San Diego from his studio on India Street. His ideas were evolving as the city was changing in the process of updating itself. His drawings and paintings are an aesthetic investigation but they also record the history of the city of San Diego at that time. Many of the images he painted depict what no longer exists. Just before it was torn down, he painted the Pacific Square Building, an old dance hall that was a real hot spot during the war. It doesn’t mean much to many people anymore but it represented the style of the 40’s which was an important time in San Diego history. His paintings of India Street are a reflection of a post-war era community. That area now exists as something else altogether.

While Bill loves to paint downtown as it used to look, he is not merely a historian, he is interested in the dynamics of change. As he watched and recorded the transformation of Center City, his interest grew, especially in the tall buildings. He was watching the City go from low horizontal buildings to vertical. As the buildings around him got taller, he became curious about the new views being created by those tall buildings and began visiting the buildings-in-progress. Once on the construction sites, he became interested in the transformation of the building itself as it progresses in its construction and in the people who work there, creating the transformation. He began a new series of buildings under construction and an ongoing worker series, which depicts people working as well as going to and from work.

“People make up a city. People define what the city is, not the buildings. Architecture is form following function and each city has its own personality. The new architecture of San Diego seems to be a mixture of styles. It has not yet developed its personality. It takes time to identify ‘self’, but it is trying.” So says Bill Mosley, its most devoted observer. A favorite quote is from Judith Christensen, “Inevitably, we will always be engaged in the process of change. The question becomes, are the factors that should be considered the factors that are being considered.”

Most of Bill’s images, whether pastel on paper or oil on canvas, depict buildings and the people who inhabit the environment created by the buildings. Each image must have a certain dynamic, a compositional strength that he finds exciting. To create the image he wants to paint, he makes collages out of photographs he has taken on site. Liking the irregular edges of his collages, Bill began creating canvases in those shapes.

Bill’s work, with its warm colors and sense of locale, brings to mind Bay Area artists Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, both careful observers of their environment. Like Diebenkorn in particular, he pushes his representational work to the point of abstraction. However, it would never be confused with Diebenkorn’s work.

While busy with his teaching responsibilities, Bill is still very much a working artist and enjoys the challenge of doing site-specific work. Because his images seem to have a certain broad appeal to many people and the clean lines of his paintings translate well into the new computer generated geclee printing process, he has begun publishing limited editions of some of his work. Multiples, with their lower prices, provide an opportunity for the artist to make his work available to a wider audience.

Bill Mosley’s work will be featured at the Pratt Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., San Diego, from September 9th through the 29th. There will be an opening reception on Friday, September 9th from 6 to 9pm. The gallery is open Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm, and Saturday 1 to 5pm, (619) 236-0211.