Artist Biography
William Fink
“Questions inspire me to make experiments, and Experiments help create my Art”.
I began playing with photography when I was 12 years old. By the time I was 14, I got my first photo job by placing an ad in a Newspaper, asking to purchase a used photo timer. The owner of the photo lab contacted me asking if I would be interested in working for him so I could buy a timer with money I could earn…. so, I left my job as a paperboy.
For most of my life I have been interested in many of the early innovators of Photography, who each extended photography a little further: Herschel, Niepce, Talbot, Daguerre and many other innovators so photography could eventually get to where it is today.
When I read that Herschel invented the first photo fixer, I wondered if there were other ways to keep a picture from turning black once I turned on the white light. I found that by using Isopropyl alcohol, the image was retained when the lights were turned on. Although, that picture turned slightly greenish over time, I still have that picture I made on Oct 26th 1969.
Many years later, I told a friend that I believed I could finally make a picture of a person using their ashes. Was I crazy, or did this extend photography in a new way? He asked his neighbor who was dying of AIDS if he would meet with me, and he said yes.
Of the many artists who have made interesting artwork, I admire Jackson Pollock who used splattered paint to create his random abstract art, Andy Warhol who used Silk-Screening to present common images, and Picasso, Leonardo Davinci, Paul Klee and others who created their own distinct techniques, style and process.
Materials MATTER, and when they are turned into the picture…it extends our appreciation of photography and the materials around us because we are matter!
Picture of Bill Fink: Light-And-Shade Photo Watermark “ Chiaroscuro”
Handmade Paper
Who Taught Us to Think the Way WE Think?
When should we listen to others and when should we think for ourselves?
By the time we spend a lifetime absorbing what others have taught us, how much of me is me, and how much of you is really you? We need to find the part of us that is exclusively us, to get beyond the mold-making we have been taught. I think Goals, dreams, and passions are a great place to find ourselves.
Albert Einstein said that imagination is the greatest creative force. It is not education because that is information that others before us have given us. I do not understand where ideas come from. For me they come from looking at what I see and then asking what if?
We all live in a world we are trying to make sense of. Experimenting helps us find answers to our questions!
Accomplishments
- BA in Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona
- Member of the Golden Key Honors Society
- Accepted for Master’s Program at Claremont Colleges, but decided to be self- taught.
- Prior Part-time professor at Pasadena City College and the Printing Institute, formerly the Print Union School.
- Historian of old Photographic and Printing processes and innovator of my own processes.
- Founder of a non-profit 501c3 foundation to promote new ideas.