Meet Robert Willis

---

By the age of thirteen or fourteen I had developed an urge to put down on paper those things that I saw around me, the colors, the moods of the sky, the folds of the land. With a dime-store box, of paints, a couple of brushes and paper in a rucksack, I roamed the woodlands and the meadows and the marshes of my far northern New York State homeland.

Our neighbors were mostly dairy farmers, no painters, no artists. But my father knew of a painter in Utica and took me to see him. Chauncey Adams worked as custodian of a church where he lived in the basement. He sat on the edge of his cot leafing through a stack of the landscapes he'd painted of the Mohawk Valley. I saw the magic and was hooked. 

As I was leaving high school, a sympathetic teacher urged me to apply for entry in Pratt Institute School of Art. I was accepted and spent a wondrous year and a half there. Then Pearl Harbor happened and I left school to join the army. As an infantry soldier fighting in Italy, I carried a small sketchbook in my pack. During lulls between battles, I’d put down impressions of what I saw.Through all the years since that war, many lived abroad, my watercolor box has never been far from my reach. Some of my paintings have received  awards in national and international exhibits Quite a few hang in private collections in the U.S.A. and in Europe. It is an honor to be a Signature Member of Watercolor West.

My infatuation with watercolor goes on. Elusive and capricious, it taunts us with the promise of glorious possibilities. In the classes I conduct I attempt to transmit to others the joy of flowing water and pigment applied to paper with a brush.