S.H. Bill Burgin

A native of Cato, Faulkner County, Arkansas and born in 1930, Bill has been interested in painting and photography since his teenage years. In the depression and war years few opportunities were available to him for developing and building on those interests so it wasn't until he was well established in the business world that he began exploring his talents in these artistic outlets.

Painting

His earliest memories of art include a time during the 1930s depression when his parents traded chickens and farm produce to a local starving artist for several primitive oil landscape paintings. Undoubtedly, those paintings influenced his interest in art to such an extent that when he finally began painting in his late thirties, landscape painting, was, and has remained his primary interest as subject matter. Bill has studied painting in oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, and oil pastels but has found the latter to be the most versatile and challenging for "catching the light" in landscape painting. Pastels and oil pastels are the most enduring of mediums when properly framed under glass.

His style is unique and rather eclectic as he strives to avoid stagnant style “labels".  His favorite painting places are Arkansas, New Mexico, Great Britain, and Mexico.

His training as a painter includes classes at the Arkansas Arts Center, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and privately with several outstanding artists in Arkansas and, for two years, in Oxford, England. He has participated in workshops over the years given by many internationally known artists, the latest of which were in New York with Wolf Kahn and with John Elliot.

Bill is a member of Arkansas League of Artists, Oil Pastel Association, Mid-Southern Watercolorists, Arkansas Artists Cooperative, and is a founding officer of the Arkansas Pastel Society.  He has won a number of awards in shows in Arkansas and Great Britain.  He recently won an award in a juried national exhibition.

Photography

Except for three workshops with Matt Bradley, an internationally known Little Rock photographer, Bill is largely self-taught in photography.

Bill's first camera was a small Kodak Brownie at age 16, and his interest deepened very quickly as he began learning photography on his own with extensive research, reading and many trials and errors. His first 35mm single lens reflex camera was a joy! He set out to master it and soon learned that landscape photography was his most engrossing subject. He has traveled extensively in North America and Europe where photographic images in color provide a wonderful journal of his travels that he loves to share with others.