Beverly Willis, Artist

Beverly Willis established her art practice and used her multi—media art skills to support herself upon graduation from University of Hawaii (1954) with a Fine Arts degree. Prior to enrolling the University, she had a one-person exhibit of watercolors at Maxwell Gallery (1952) in San Francisco. At the University, she apprenticed with fresco painter-muralist Jean Charlot, a founder of Mexican Muralism, and studied with Gustav Ecke, an internationally known scholar of Chinese History. Willis’s diverse studies and artistic research resulted in a multiplicity, sometimes contradictory set of ideas, regarding the future of art. In this climate Willis’s ideas about an abstract visual language was born. Her ideas took on new roots much later with the development of the Chaos Theory and the invention of new imaging technologies of magnification that reveal the shape of actual particles that construct all organic things. Earlier Willis studied aeronautical engineering at Oregon State University, soloed at age 15 and received her pilot’s license at 18. Her career eventually expanded into Industrial design, then architecture. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Honolulu Academy of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NY. Willis’s artwork is included in public and private collections.