Curriculum Vitae / Biography
®William Harris is a mixed-media abstract artist from Georgia, USA. He attended United Electronic Laboratories in Birmingham Alabama 1967-68. Graduated in 1974 from LaGrange College with a BA, double majoring in Art and Psychology with a minor in Religion and where he won juried show awards in Painting and Photography. Since college, William has pursued several entrepreneurial endeavors each stretching the boundaries of his knowledge and expertise in the fields of art, color, design, sciences, and fluid motion.
History in Relation to the ART - (a personal view)
After graduating college, I was making real good money doing pencil portraits along with airbrushing vans, cycles, and apparel. I became very interested in silk screening and learned that there were only two locations in the states that offered hand printed material in the form of very expensive drapery and wall coverings. The two locations were Georgia Hand Prints in Carrollton, GA and Key West handprints in Key West, Fl. I took a job as a colorist/chemist at Georgia Handprints (GHP). The designs that GHP printed came from very skilled commercial artist designers. Their colors had to be an exact match. GHP did not purchase ink. Instead, they bought all of the components to make archival/ non-fading acrylic screen printing ink. I already had the complex skills necessary to produce exact color matching. What a great opportunity to learn the intricate components and chemistry of such a difficult task. It did not take long before I was making and selling quite a lot of my own acrylic paint. This endeavor led me to be the first to manufacture and sell airbrush ink. I called it Aqua Flow and Hydra Color Systems. As rewarding as this was, I soon felt the need to continue my pursuit of the creation of art. Hence came the formation of Total Graphics, which eventually became T-Graphics, Inc. This business enabled me to get back to my art and designs producing 1000s of logos, designs for signs, and silkscreening apparel and fabrics. Silkscreening millions of tee shirts with fantastic designs. The emergence of digital graphics became a creative reality with the release of Mac II computers in early 1987. Before that time it was black and white only. I remember going to a graphics conference in Atlanta where they made an announcement that we just went over 10,000 people on the Arpanet which became the World Wide Web. My digital fine art was called “Art Untouched by Human Hands”. At this time, coated canvas was not commercially available to reproduce the art so I made my own coating to apply to Kodak photo papers and rolls of canvas. This eventually became known as Large Digital Format Printing. This opened the door to the reproduction of fine art prints - Giclees’ . The technology used for this printing method was Piezo based. In the most basic sense, a micro amount of ink (dot size) was forced into a small nozzle head to which a voltage was applied. This surge of voltage created an explosion of the moisture (water) in the ink which lead to the deposit of the solvent based color onto the substrate. They now have micro piezo with 1000s of nozzles within the printhead. I became one of the first “Fine Art digital printers”. The technologies and quality kept growing with improvements. As exciting as this was, I realized that I was still away from my deep personal ideas and visions of the combined experimental use of certain sciences to produce works of art. So to be all-in focused and committed to the fine art path, we sold all the commercial venture of graphics art in 2021. We are now secluded on our 55.12 acres of land in a county with only one traffic light and two caution lights and a 1 mile long driveway. It took a year to build my 3500 square foot studio as we milled lumber from our land using our portable Wood Miser saw mill. Most of the lumber used was from fallen trees from storms . . some were over 150 years old. The Studio houses machines and tools needed for the demanding craft side of this art production process.