Artist of the Week: Bill Spear

Best known locally perhaps as the “pin guy”. I began a business creating and marketing enamels over 35 years ago. It was one of the very first “information age” businesses. I could draw the designs in Alaska, or on the road in a motel room, have them produced in Taipei and sell them in France or Antarctica. On their travels people reported back that they saw our enamels “everywhere”: in hundreds of Nature Company and Natural Wonders stores and in national catalogs mailed to them. No one then could figure it out. Generous journalists have described me as an “artist” but I make claim to little more than making a living drawing. If there is a genuine artistic act with the enamels it is in the entire body of work, not individual designs.

I also have produced work in the fields of sheetmetal forming (as in sculptural and automotive forms) gold and silversmithing, watercolor and oil painting beading machinist work (lathe, mill etc) tool making, welding, metal fabrication, automotive restoration and as a writer.

With no formal training I am in no position to give anyone any advice, but, the one element that seems to walk across everything successful I do personally, and what I find almost invariably in others whose work I most admire is obsession. I have come to regard it as perhaps the most important human quality and is more important in my view than raw intelligence in works of genius. Of course it is really a sort of mental disease, but it’s like Tom Robbin’s hump on the camel. It is a big hairy ugly awful thing we bear, but, it is what gets you through the desert.