Bill Ward

Roll Up Project is pleased to present recent paintings by Bill Ward. Ward’s paintings and drawings are meditations on the objects, people, and environments that shape our daily lives.

Ward’s drawings and paintings are based on observations gleaned from walks around his neighborhood in West Oakland. Around 2022, Ward was invited to create a mural for a building near Lake Merritt. He scanned elements from several works on paper to create a massive digital collage, which would act as a preparatory drawing for the mural. While the project didn’t come to fruition, Ward continues to work with digital collage, enhancing his ability to resize and adjust painted elements and create complex, layered scenes. Now on view in the Harrison Street window, the digital collage entitled Cancelled Mural Project (2022-2024) features a liquor store, church, and barbecue restaurant next to Victorian homes and gardens bursting with color. In the background, the Port of Oakland bustles with full container ships. As viewers get closer, other details come into focus: most of the people on the street are carrying guns, aiming them at each other in narrative scenes. Dogs travel in packs, a few of them nibbling on disembodied arms and legs. Many stories and experiences are happening simultaneously in this environment, like a modern take on a Pieter Bruegel scene.

In the windows on Third Street, City on Fire (2022) presents another fantastical approach in bold yellows, reds and oranges set against gray and black. Fire-breathing dragons traverse the city, which crackles with flames and inky clouds. In the background, spotlights and stars fill the patchworked sky, evoking light and movement. In both City on Fire and Cancelled Mural Project, fantasy and exaggeration are employed as tools for humor, and for eliciting a dialogue with the viewer. Which elements ring true, and which are excessive? What imagery is based on perceptions from outsiders?

Ward’s observations of everyday life also turn inward, to more personal conversations about objects as storytellers. For example, Books (2023) features titles like “Plasma Physics” and “Quantum Electrodynamics” alongside Diebenkorn, Giotto, Van Gogh, and Guston monographs. Ward explains that his father was a physicist, and after he died, Ward and his siblings all jostled to pick the physics books from his library. Seen together, the books, Polaroid camera, notebooks, and VHS tapes speak to the accumulation of both knowledge and memory that guide us long after family members and friends are gone.

About the Artist

Bill Ward’s paintings and drawings present richly colored, fantasy-inflected observations of everyday life in Oakland. His work has been exhibited at Gallery 16 (San Francisco) and the Richard L. Nelson Gallery (Davis), among others. He graduated with a BFA from Humboldt State in 1996, and an MFA from UC Davis in 1998.

Learn more about Bill Ward on his website or Instagram at @billward33.