The Art & Times of William Farley : 06 of 07
By Robert Anbian, Release Print, Vol. XVIII No. 9, November 1995Tell us how Bill Farley became an artist.
Once again, things I muse upon. I grew up outside of Boston and my father was an Irish Catholic and my mother was Protestant. That was considered a mixed marriage when I was a child. So people looked at me a little strangely. My mother was American. But her father was from Scotland and her mother was English and had been in New England for a couple of hundred years. It was a Yankee Protestant marrying Irish Catholic. It was extremely controversial. My mother told me that some of her neighbors, some of the girls she'd gone to high school with, were forbidden to talk to her after she married my father. So, even as a child, the way people kind of looked at me skewed allowed me to look at being alive in a slightly skewed way .... The only book I read in high school was a book that was circulating among my friends, On the ,Road by Jack Kerouac. It had a very strong influence on me. It showed me a world I didn't even know existed. The other thing in high school [is that] I had gone pretty much to the nightclubs in Boston with phony IDs. I had seen, you know, Shelly Berman, Mort Sahl, I even saw Lenny Bruce perform. Not knowing what I was doing, my extreme interest in the world brought me into places that I had no business being in. After high school, I went in the tradition of all my relatives into a factory. But all my life I used to draw. I used to do little drawings. They were a way for me to create a space for myself in a very small house that was filled with people. I lived with my grandmother who was born in 1880, died in 1970. She was born before electricity and saw them land on the moon. That was my mother's mother. It was a very small house. I always did drawings that comforted me. I don't know where they came from. I had an uncle who worked in a factory. I was about seven years old, and he brought over a roll of tracing paper. I ended up tracing everything, cracks on the floor, newspapers, linoleum. From that tracing, I started my own drawing. My mother showed my drawings to a woman who was an artist. The woman said, "Oh, he's very talented. He should go to art school." My mother suggested this to me. Not only had I never thought of it before, but it was like being paroled from jail. I thought it was the greatest idea I'd ever heard!
Your mother was an angel.What a miracle! So I went to art school in Boston, and I went as a commercial artist, because coming out of the working class, you had to do something. If you were going to be creative, it had to be something you made money at. While I was in that school, there was a teacher, a young man who had just graduated from Yale, a painter named Bill Georgenes, who took me under his wing. He saw something in me that I did not see in myself He, in his very subtle way, turned me on to things as a student. That was the beginning of the path of being an artist. I had the great fortune to be tutored by people continuously. I graduated from that art school and was drafted into the army. I graduated from art school May 19. May 22, 1 was wearing a uniform. I didn't know what hit me. But again, the serendipitous thing .... after basic training the assignments were listed up. I was assigned a job as an army illustrator. And in the army you could take classes in your job and the army would pay for them. I ended up going to Maryland Institute College of Art, at night, and discovered sculpture. I came out to San Francisco on a merchant ship in 1969. 1 had never been on the West Coast. I hadn't traveled much at all. We went through the Panama Canal. We came under the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, late July. It was absolutely spectacular. The city was illuminated. The lights were coming up. The combination blew my circuits. We docked and I quit. [laughter] I jumped ship. I think I still haven't totally separated myself from the romance of that moment.