William Eaken

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Imagination has always been the key element in the artwork of William L. Eaken. As a child he was inspired by storybook illustrations, and consequently, by his early teens was writing and illustrating his own tales. A major influence occurred at the age of ten when Bill read Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" illustrated by the 19th century artist Gustav Dore. This left a powerful and lasting impression on him. The poetic, philosophical, and mystical continues to be at the core of his work.

In 1981 Bill entered college to study art, yet quickly found himself concentrating on philosophy instead. But in 1984, returning to his first love, he transferred to
California State University, Fullerton, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree four years later. For the next 10 years he enjoyed an exciting and varied career as an artist in the entertainment industry, creating everything from advertising and poster art, traditional animation, and magazine and book cover illustration. A highly versatile artist, Bill has done traditional painting, computer animation, storyboarding, cartooning, and concept design for books and films.

As an independent contractor, Bill has created work for Rhino Records, Paramount Pictures, Steven Spielberg, NASA and also worked for three years at Lucas Arts.

In 1998 he began pursuing his own mystical vision in fine art. Sometimes playful, and sometimes deeply personal, the poetic, philosophical, and mystical continues to be at the core of his work. He loves working with the sculptural beauty and drama
of human and animal forms, often juxtaposing them, exploring the tensions between the intellect and the deeper animal energies that the modern world seeks to suppress, or market to, producing only chaos. Bill's paintings are expressions of the desire to reunite the two forces, moving, not back to the primitive, but
forward, to a transcendent worldview, where the distinction no longer exists.

"What I'm trying to do is not so much paint visual representations, but visual poems. I think of it as 'Romantic Symbolism.' They are romantic in that beauty and sensuality are core values. But they are symbolic in that personal and philosophical meaning runs very deep, even when it's not immediately obvious to the viewer."

His work has appeared in many galleries in California, Hawaii, and Florida.

Always enjoying creative projects, Bill has written a novel for middle school and young adults, invented an acrylic paint that dries as slow as oil paint, and is
currently developing a concept for generating electricity from wind by using architectural elements of a building.