Willard Bond

Willard Bond was born in 1926, under an expanse of unobstructed sky in the rolling grasslands of the Inland Northwest. He was fascinated by the Universe and never tired of looking to the stars as a source of navigation, inspiration and guidance. Growing up in the rural towns of Pullman, Washington and Lewiston, Idaho, the thought he would become a professional artist, and master painter of America's Cup 12 Meter racing yachts, was not yet a glimmer in anyone's imagination.

A man of many contradictions, Willard spent his life seeking to find an equilibrium between solitude and community. He spent long stretches of time alone, occupying himself with making art, tackling ambitious building projects, or reading for hours and days—history, science and novels. By contrast, he was a natural performer and loved people of all backgrounds, sharing stories and adventures. He grew up surrounded by the open grasslands of the Palouse and the endless evergreens of Idaho forests, with his last 25 years in New York's Catskill Mountains, yet his definitive painting subject was the power of ocean waters and the action of modern racing sailboats.

EARLY CREATIVE INFLUENCES AND A LOVE OF NATURE

Lucile and Arthur Bond had two sons, Robert born in 1919, and Willard, born seven years later in 1926. They had a successful Studebaker car dealership in Pullman, Washington before the Depression forced them to close. They moved to Lewiston, Idaho and ran a popular little café, The Campus Canteen, where Lucile and Arthur cooked hearty meals and baked pies for college students from the North Idaho Teachers College, now Lewis-Clark State College. The family lived in an apartment behind the shop. They managed a modest lifestyle, while feeding the many grateful young students living away from home.

Bill, as he was called then, was always the energetic, active, imaginative person for which he became known in his adult life, never destined to follow in the academic footsteps of his grandfather, his uncle or his older brother, all physicians. He was compelled to chart his own course, follow his own passions. At the age of 12, he began to draw and paint landscapes and portraits, emulating the idealistic style of Norman Rockwell. His mother was the artistic influence in the family, always keeping her hands busy with creative projects. She was a poet and journal keeper, and was very supportive of young Bill's pursuits. Collaborating with her in 1951, he designed a series of lyrical black and white illustrations using copperplate etching for River Harvest, a published book of her poems.

His love of boating and being on the water was engraved into his soul during his formative years at his grandparents' houseboat on Idaho's beautiful Lake Coeur d'Alene. He spent long summers swimming, fishing and boating with the aunts, uncles and cousins. In high school he was in a marching band, then became the drummer in the Melody Makers, a dance band that played regularly for college dances around the area. Drumming was the perfect way to channel his kinetic energy. He loved to perform and express himself. Foreshadowing what his future would hold, at the age of seventeen he brought his drum kit to a downtown photography studio and had his first promotional shots taken.

Always independent, he served in the US Forest Service for two summers as a fire spotter in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest. He lived alone in a lookout tower high over the majestic evergreens, with the occasional resupply visit, hiking the back country, and scanning the horizon to spot any signs of smoke arising from the summer lighting storms that swept through the star-filled Idaho skies.

THE WAR YEARS AND WITNESSING HIROSHIMA

Willard came of age at the height of World War ll. Everyone knew the slender, sensitive, artistic kid wouldn't do well as an Army man and wanted him to join the Navy like his brother. Passing the Navy physical, he was excited to finally be on a train heading to boot camp, the day after his 18th birthday—June 7, 1944. His close-knit family was heartbroken to see him leave, but proud that he was off to serve his country. Little did anyone know that the war then raging in the Pacific would end fourteen months later with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 and three days later, Nagasaki.

After attending basic training and learning to use a weapon, he found himself at the naval base in Chicago training as a radio technician. Measuring up as very intelligent on their aptitude tests but uniquely unsuited to anything that involved technology, he wanted to become an artist. He boldly requested to leave the base to attend night classes at The Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his first formal art training. With his drumming experience, he moved to the Naval School of Music in Washington DC and became a Naval Musician Third Class, assigned to the 12th Cruiser Division and shipped out to the Pacific as the drummer in the flagship band.

Upon the end of the Pacific war, his ship, the USS Montpelier, was one of the earliest US ships to land in Japan, at Wakanoura Bay, September 11, 1945. They were tasked with assisting the evacuation of US prisoners of war, emaciated men who had been transported by train from the inland camps to the harbor, and into hurriedly improvised health stations to be evaluated and debriefed before being put aboard ships for their journey home. His band was stationed ashore to play for these newly-freed sailors. Letters home describe this as an emotional and dramatic experience for all involved.

Three days later, he was in a party of eight sailors to be granted shore leave. They took a ride on a landing boat from the Montpelier right up into Hiroshima harbor. He wrote to his parents:

We were the first liberty party in Hiroshima … We must have walked for 15 miles … I am ashamed, yes ashamed of my fellow man. I have seen it! With my own two eyes. I have seen it! I have stood within a few hundred feet of where a small eight pound bomb hit the earth and in doing so destroyed a city and its people … the destruction in a second of what took hundreds of years to build … this chaos that extended all around me for miles and miles … Yes, I was at Hiroshima yesterday …

Everything fractured. Nothing that he had known before seemed solid or reliable. Raised as an innocent boy, in a bucolic small-town environment, it was a life-altering shock to realize that everything he thought he knew could be vaporized in a flash. Like many veterans of war, he didn’t speak much about these traumatic experiences until decades later, but the effect was seismic on his personality, launching him on the non-conformist, improvisational path he followed for the remainder of his life, and leading him to express the intensity, anguish and suffering through the energetic, fragmented planes of his artwork.

ART SCHOOL AND LIVING IN NEW YORK

Honorably discharged from the Navy in June of 1946, he went to art school on the G.I. Bill, first getting his degree at the Pratt Institute School of Art in Brooklyn in 1949, then on to Manhattan, where he furthered his art training with two years at the Art Students League. He learned techniques and materials, and honed his drawing, graphic design and draftsmanship talents as an illustrator and portraitist. He spent four summers in the Adirondacks teaching art at Timberland, a vacation resort. He settled in Manhattan and became a beatnik and a true New Yorker, living there on and off for the next 60 years, immersed in the density, grit, vibrancy and excitement of the city.

His first marriage, to Betty-Jane Aaronson in 1952, lasted three years before they amicably parted ways. In 1957 Willard met Susannah Kirkham, a student at the acclaimed Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater, where she studied acting with Sanford Meisner and worked with the pioneering modern dancer, Martha Graham. Both in the arts and from the same distant region—she from Spokane, Washington—they sparked a romance that led to a summer spent together back in the Adirondacks, at Timberland, acting in Summer Stock theater and teaching art.

THE BOWERY LOFT IN LOWER MANHATTAN

Married in 1958, Willard and Susannah moved into a huge loft space on Grand Street and Bowery in New York's Lower East Side, bordered by Little Italy on one side and Chinatown on the other. The loft had a 30-foot, pressed tin ceiling with a large skylight in the center, flanked by eight arched windows, each topped with stained glass. It was a decommissioned Orthodox synagogue built in the late 1860s. Willard constructed living quarters in the front areas, his huge industrial studio in the back, and hung a long swing from the high center beam. Over the next thirteen years, the place became known as a salon-style center of Bohemian life, with painting and ceramics, jazz and musical theater, dance, film, photography, and a revolving cast of friends and creatives in the arts community. Many of them were also from far away, each one drawn to New York, banding together with a common urge to find a new paradigm of living and creating; all seekers, all reinventing themselves.

In the 1960s, influenced by well-known painters of the New York School art scene, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Klein— fifteen to twenty years older than Willard, and denizens of the nearby Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village—Willard was painting large Abstract Expressionist oils, and getting welcome success and attention for them. He began analysis with a Jungian psychologist, exploring the consciousness of the inner self as a source of art. His process of self-discovery led him to create emotionally-charged content expressed as pure gesture and color. Over the next fifty years, this evolved into a fascination with new discoveries in quantum physics and his own philosophy that the energy of the greater cosmos was manifested through his painting.

CREATING CERAMIC MURALS

For a time in the late 1950s, Willard worked as a commercial artist creating ceramic tile wall pieces for restaurants and offices. He later used this experience to create his own massive ceramic murals in his Bowery studio, where he installed two industrial kilns, with large tables to lay out the tiles. A productive period of ceramic mural creation followed, with at least twelve commissioned murals installed in the early 1960s, some in lobbies of the luxury mid-century modern buildings that sprouted up in the years of post-war prosperity, several of which remain in Manhattan today. The subjects were primarily abstracts, but one pair of large murals, still in the lobby of 25 Sutton Place, depicts striking compositions of beautiful sailboats and tall ships. He was also using the kilns to experiment with fused glass, copper enameling, and individual tile and crackled glass artworks.

FAMILY AND THEATER LIFE IN THE LOFT

In December 1959, Willard and Susannah had a baby girl, Gretchen. Painter friends who lived on the top floor above the loft, Margo and John Spoerri, shortly followed with two young children of their own, Stefan and Johanna. The three grew up together in the building; art studio kids running around having a lively time with unconventional, artist parents and few boundaries.

Susannah drew Willard into the theater, where they both performed as founding actors in The Prince Street Players, a musical comedy troupe that rehearsed highly-original versions of classic children's tales in a loft on Prince and Wooster, in what's now known as Soho. His resonant baritone was well-suited for roles as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz or the King in Sleeping Beauty. He also built sets and props, and painted theater backdrops in his huge studio space.

As with many Bohemian artistic lives, the creativity was combined with chaos. A drinking habit among the artists' circles, the long hours self-reflecting and making art, the self-doubt that inevitably haunts the artistic soul, the feast and famine cycle of getting paid well for a large ceramic mural commission or painting show, which took many lean months to create, and not earning a living at a conventional job, all took a toll on the marriage.

It was also a time of huge transitions and upheaval in the culture of the time. People were looking for freedom from the conventions with which they had grown up. In 1966, Susannah moved back to the Pacific Northwest with their daughter, and resettled in Seattle. In the end, none of their friends in the loft life on the Lower East Side remained married. Another fracturing.

NAVIGATING HIS OWN COURSE

To support his painting life, Willard took a variety of odd jobs. He chose to never have steady employment, and was known to say, "All my life, I have avoided punching a time clock. Whenever I did, it was debilitating." He was a furniture mover, a museum guard for the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Met Cloisters, a property master for independent movies, did lighting and stage-managing in off-Broadway theater, acted in a touring company of Bertolt Brecht's play, The Exception and the Rule, and on commission, he hand-built beautiful mid-century modern furniture, lamps and interiors.

Willard was a modernist, looking to the future and shedding the constraints of the past, in his art and in his life. In the late 1960s to early 70s, he turned away from pure abstraction to create a series of large-format, luminous nudes made from life drawings. He began to practice Transcendental Meditation, and was also inspired by Buckminster Fuller's futuristic Operational Manual for Spaceship Earth and the geodesic dome movement, where he saw art and action combined.

LIFE IN JAMAICA AND BUILDING GEODESIC DOMES IN THE JUNGLE

In 1970, he met and married his third wife and lifetime companion, Lois Friedel Bond. They left New York in 1971, and moved for five years to Jamaica, where she taught in a small school for children with special needs, and he built several large geodesic domes in which they lived in the jungle, implementing Fuller's ideas of a fully integrated architecture using simple, natural shapes. Experimenting with a variety of materials, and creating the domes as if they were oversized sculptures, he finished by making two large domes for a school organized by the Peace Corps and USAID.

Lois was very supportive of Willard's art career, and he was exceedingly proud of her, and the groundbreaking work she did with children. Lois had a long professional career dedicated to children with special needs, and became a pioneer in early intervention for children with autism. Back in New York, she earned a Master's degree in Special Education at NYU, followed by PhD studies. Among varied jobs, she was Program Director at the United Cerebral Palsy children's school in Manhattan. Later, with business partner Kathleen Kuhlman, they developed an agency and a center for children with autism in New York City—the Children's Home Intervention Program, (CHIP). In collaboration with her sister, Mary Friedel Diop, Lois went on to help found the Child Health Improvement Program (CHIP International), focusing on Africa. She was instrumental in its funding, and followed this work until her sudden death at 77, on November 30, 2019. Lois and Willard also traveled together over many years, visiting family in California, Ohio, Washington, Idaho, France, Holland and Senegal.

RETURN TO NEW YORK DURING OPERATION SAIL AND THE US BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

In 1975, Willard and Lois moved back from Jamaica to New York and took an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, two blocks from the Promenade and its dramatic view of Manhattan. They had returned to the city just at the time of the 1976 US Bicentennial celebrations and Operation Sail, with the spectacular, square rigger tall ships from around the world sailing into New York Harbor.

Willard took a job as the night Pier Master of the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan, and had the unique opportunity and access to go aboard these majestic vessels and get to know their crews. With no space to paint the large oils that had been his trademark, he picked up the watercolor brushes of his youth and started painting in a small studio in their apartment. These dramatic, tall ships became his muses, and after some experimentation to refine his draftsmanship and newly-developing technique, the momentum and spontaneity of applying paint to his large-scale watercolors became second nature.

DISCOVERING HIS INSPIRATION: THE VIBRANT SUBJECT OF 12 METER YACHT RACING

Searching for more contemporary subjects, he found himself drawn to Newport, Rhode Island and the 12 Meter America's Cup yacht racing scene. The thrill and speed of these beautiful boats with their billowing sails, along with the courage and daring of the sailors who raced them, captured his heart and soul. He had finally found his perfect subject. His own dynamic, expressive gestures merged with the exuberant action of the magnificent racing yachts and their crews, battling through wind and water. It was a subject and a community that would inspire him for the rest of his life.

He began to reach out to Manhattan galleries with his innovative watercolor style, and in 1979, was picked up by Sportsman's Edge-King Gallery on the Upper East Side, the genesis of a productive career of gallery representation for his unique marine art. He went on to develop lifelong relationships with Arnold Art Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island, Annapolis Marine Art Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland, the Maritime Art Gallery of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut and the J. Russell Jinishian Gallery now in Stonington, Connecticut. The relationships and friendships Willard had with these gallery owners and their associates nurtured and sustained him and his painting. The galleries published a number of fine art lithograph editions to satisfy the growing fan base for Willard's expressive America's Cup racing action paintings. In 2018, galleries in Florida, Art on Duval Key West and Art on 5th Naples, discovered him and now also show his work.

EMBRACING NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR FINE ART PRINTS

In the 1990s, Willard connected with Greg Ortega, owner of Gamma One Conversions, whose patented lighting system allowed for the photography of art with extreme high fidelity to the original. An early pioneer of giclée printing, he photographed original art at his Manhattan studio, first on 8" x 10" film transparencies and later with digital photography, printing individual, large scale, museum quality prints on fine art paper or specialized canvas. (1)

This technique was a game-changer for Willard, who was able to create his own program of limited edition giclées, printed one at a time with archival pigments. He realized that the best audience for his marine work were people who loved and owned boats, so he began to attend the big annual boat shows, particularly the United States Sail Boat Show in Annapolis and the New York Boat Show at the Javits Center in Manhattan. With the assistance of friends and associates, he set up an art gallery at each of the shows, took orders for the giclées and signed posters and limited edition lithographs of his work. Over many years, with his ready wit and gregarious way with words, he developed personal friendships and a large following of art appreciators, and became known for painting the wind.

THE JOY AND EXCITEMENT OF SAILING

Willard found joy and freedom in sailing and being on the open water. Back in 1963, he and Susannah bought an 18-foot wooden sloop named Skoshi, and they sailed around Long Island Sound. In 1978, he and Lois bought an antique 33-foot Chesapeake Bay skipjack, The Young American, which they sailed for many adventurous years out of East Hampton, Long Island. Though not as powerful and sleek as the 12 Meter racing boats he painted, the wooden skipjack was rich with history and character, allowing him the great experiences and pleasures of sailing. As he became known and trusted in the racing community, he was invited to come aboard some of the 12 Meter racing yachts during practice heats, which he found both thrilling and terrifying. His respect and love of the crews handling those amazing machines was immense.

About half my sailing experience is being terrorized by the sea. I love it, but it scares me. The tension is extreme, and continuous. It's always life and death. A lot of it is trying to overcome my fear and going ahead and doing it, then coming back to a safe indoor environment where I seek trauma therapy by painting out the fears. (2)

The racing sport photographers also took him under their collective wing and shared many images, from which he pulled details for his painting compositions. He said, "I never copy a photo. I use three or four from the same scene to get ideas." (3) Although his paintings were expressionistic and action-packed, each boat within them was authentic, with its proper rigging, insignia and crews. He had found the balance point between abstraction and representation. Sailors would tell him, "You really paint it the way it is out there."

BUILDING A DOME STUDIO IN THE CATSKILLS

Constrained by his small art studio in Brooklyn Heights, in 1990 Willard and Lois purchased a weekend property in Barryville, NY, an area in the Catskills that attracted a wave of artists leaving the city. This is where he built his last major studio. Inspired by his days in Jamaica, he purchased a 30-foot high geodesic dome kit and had a barn-raising with friends and family, assembling it onto a large platform over a weekend. He finally had the expansive studio space he craved, much like his original Bowery loft, and he began to paint again in large oils with colliding shapes and colors, creating a new series of masterful, richly textured racing action paintings, reminiscent of his earlier expressionist work.

I feel that painting is a form of meditation. I do a lot of staring at them as they evolve. It's like there's already what I call "the form" somewhere in my psyche and searching for it can't be a conscious procedure. I usually have music or CNN on while I'm working, not so much to quiet my mind, but to take it off the process of painting so the form can emerge. When it comes out on the canvas, when I capture what sailing is really like—how the water moves, how the boat moves, how the crew moves—it's like I'm communing with all the other artists in the world. (2)

FINDING HIS ARTISTIC HOME WITH THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MARINE ARTISTS

A charter member of the esteemed American Society of Marine Artists, ASMA, founded in 1978 and Dedicated to the Promotion of American Marine Art and the Free Exchange of Ideas Between Artists, Willard became an ASMA Fellow in 1983, served as a Director on the Board from 1986 through 2002, and was honored to be named Fellow Emeritus in 2009. The Society educates the public about the finest of American marine art, organizes regional juried shows, selects new members, mentors young artists, and holds a major juried members' show every three or four years, which travels for two years to maritime and art museums throughout the United States. He revered the talent, and the scholarly and technical mastery of these dedicated artists, whose styles ranged from the traditional to the contemporary. In this company, Willard finally found security in a family of fellow artists who accepted him and appreciated his highly abstract, modernist style of painting sailing boats. He became deeply involved in all the Society's activities, and relished his mentorship and leadership roles.

THE NATIONAL HOSPICE REGATTA ALLIANCE

Having come from a family of doctors, Willard was a strong believer in the hospice movement and compassionate end-of-life care. He became a supporter and active spokesperson for the National Hospice Regatta Alliance, an association that facilitates a network of regional sailing regattas every year, and organizes a national championship and gala, all benefiting local nonprofit hospices. He loved being involved with the movement and cherished the friendships he developed in the Alliance. Each year he authorized one of his racing images to be used for their publicity, annual posters and awards—a tradition that continues today.

A SEVENTY YEAR ART CAREER

An artist from 12 to 85, Willard was always moving, exploring, seeking, and curious... "I'm a sailor and I've always been an abstract painter. I guess I'm blessed with a gift that brings it all together." (3)

In a career that spanned over seventy years, his intention was to create something significant with his life and art, and he died knowing that he had achieved that.

An expressionist both by training and the circumstances of his century, he painted what it feels like to be one with the water and the wind. The intensity conveyed in his gestural brush strokes is an expression of something beyond the subject in front of him. His passion for painting the wind is the manifestation of his drive to communicate the energy and beauty that exist both in the unseen universe and within us all.

– Gretchen Bond de Limur, Napa Valley, California, 2023

(1) Gamma One Conversions, Inc. patented a lighting system that allowed for the photography of art with a high fidelity to the original. Full tonal response at the same contrast to the art (gamma 1.0) rendering both subtle highlight and deepest shadow detail, with textural and brush stroke information recorded with unprecedented accuracy. Clients included the Whitney Museum, Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, Audubon, NY Historical Society as well as galleries such as Spanierman and Gagosian, Sotheby's and Christie's. In 1987, in post-glasnost Russia, they were invited to photograph collections in the Hermitage and Pushkin museums. Owner Greg Ortega says, "We photographed original works of Keith Haring, Maxwell Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Caravaggio, Botticelli, El Greco, Goya, Sargent, Hopper, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Manet, Mary Cassatt, Frankenthaler, Stanly Boxer, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Lichtenstein, Warhol Basquiat, Rothko, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, etc., and to this list we can add Willard Bond!"

(2) Interview: "The Artist and the Sea… Seascapes." The Times Herald-Record – Sunday Magazine, pgs. 2, 9. Debra Conway, author, J. Talbott, photographer. August 18, 1996

(3) Interview: "First Around, Marine Artist Willard Bond" and "Art of the Sea." Off Shore: Northeast Boating at Its Best, pgs. 4, 42, 62-65, Mickey Clement, author. May 1998