William Augustus Berry

William Augustus Berry (1933-)
"Still Life with Blue Guide"
Pencil, 1982.
LFAC #542

Biography

William Berry was born in 1933 in Jacksonville, Texas. He studied with Everett Spruce at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a B.F.A. in 1955. In 1957 he received an M.F.A. in painting and drawing from the University of Southern California. For the next several years he worked as an illustrator and painter in New York City. In 1968 he began a long and distinguished teaching career as an assistant professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin. From 1974-78 he was an associate professor of art at Boston University, School of Visual Art, and in 1978 became professor of art at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he is now a professor emeritus. In 1989, the university awarded him the William H. Byler Distinguished Professor Award, and in 1991-1992 he was the recipient of a Curators' Professorship, an annual award given to a faculty member at Missouri in recognition of their scholarship and professional reputation.

Berry’s list of awards and fellowships is extensive. Among them are a Rockefeller Foundation Grant as an artist-in-residence at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy; a six-time Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH; selection by the Altos de Chavon Foundation to serve as artist-in-residence at the International Artists’ Colony in the Dominican Republic; and countless citations and awards from competitions and exhibitions. In 1990, thirty-two of his drawings were toured by the Mid America Arts Alliance and Exhibits USA in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2002 he received the CPSA Award for Exceptional Merit and CIPPY Trophy from the Colored Pencil Society of America. Berry’s work has been included in over 500 exhibitions and solo shows, both here and abroad; among them are the Galleria Schneider in Rome, Italy; USIA Gallery in Athens, Greece; AFME Gallery in New York City; the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA; and the Montalvo Center for the Arts, Saratoga, CA. Several private and public collections hold examples of his work. Among them are the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks; The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT; Hallmark in Kansas City, MO; the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, PA; and the Margaret Harwell Art Museum in Poplar Bluff, MO.

Works by Berry have been featured in several publications, including Esquire, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated. He has also created cover art for books published by Random House; Doubleday; Alfred A. Knopf; Scribner’s Sons; and Time, Inc. to name only a few. He has twice been profiled in the American Artist magazine, first in March 1970 and again in February 1987, and the news articles and catalogs that include his work are simply too numerous to list, as are his dozens of workshops, symposia, and lectures. He is the author of Drawing the Human Form (New York: Van Nostrand, Reinhold Publishing Company, 1977) a book that has been widely adopted by art departments across the country.

There is one work by Berry in the Luther College Fine Arts Collection, a color pencil still life that displays the ordered geometry and linear rendering for which he is known. Still Life with Blue Guide was purchased by the College from a 1982 exhibit of the artist’s work at Luther. There is another version of the work in the Hallmark Collection in Kansas City. The artist has written about this work:

You will see it has both a Blue guide (from the series of French Blue guides - Guides Bleus published by Hachette) and a red guide (from the series published by the Italian Touring Club). There is also a yellow box for [a] roll of Kodak film in addition to the polyhedra. All of these references are to travel. The way in which the facets of the ‘white’ colorless polyhedra take on their own coloration based on their spatial orientation and juxtaposition to adjacent colored objects is a formal problem which I have tried to explore in this drawing. I was also interested in the interplay of the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. Additionally I was intrigued with the contrast between the faceted geometric solids and the more organic, fee falling folds of the table cloth.

Updated 03/06/2009