William Reynolds 1939-2023

A Midwesterner by birth and upbringing, Bill was born in Hastings, Nebraska, grew up as a child in St. Louis and was a  teenager in Indianapolis. At age eighteen he headed for northern California, where he studied  at the San Francisco Art Institute and met simpatico classmate Ron Davis. These lifelong friends shared a studio and painted geometric canvasses in reaction to the Bay Area’s prevailing postwar gestural abstraction. When Bill saw Bridget Riley’s vibrant optical paintings, they “blew his mind.”  By the mid-1960s, while he was working as a cable car brakeman, major museums and galleries were exhibiting his large, shaped, rhythmic paintings in bold, contrasting colors.

Bill moved to New York City in 1965, to a loft in the same building as John Coltrane, who practiced scales interminably. Bill didn’t mind. In 1968, he and his wife Fran left the pressure cooker of downtown Manhattan’s art world. They took a freight ship to Yugoslavia, bought a camper in Munich, and drove to India. Living in the foothills of the Himalayas, India was pivotal in Bill’s shift to art as a spiritual path. He taught art in Mumbai where he met Pie Projects co-founder Devendra Contractor, who was then age eleven. They became friends for life. In 1973, the year before Bill returned to the US, he had a solo exhibition in New Delhi of his diaphanous silver tondos. These glowing circular compositions seem to emit their own light whether alive with fluttering butterflies or pulsating skeins. 

Bill and Fran settled in Santa Fe in 1974. They worked hard for decades, built a business and the home of their dreams. They retired in 2013.  And, Voila! Bill had time and a studio with good light and a great sound system. After years of polishing stone, he gravitated to the velvety softness of pastel. He often called his vertical “bar code” columns of intense color on toothy black paper “portraits.” But, you don’t need to know the names of his subjects; they are stand-alone magic.