On May 31, 2005 Bill had his last day at his Taos New Mexico Ledoux Street Gallery. He sold that very
day an important painting, Woman with Pomegranates, Oil on Canvas, 36x48 (2004).
He would never again visit the gallery he owned and loved. Several days later--following a great family struggle--Bill
was diagnosed at Santa Fe's Saint Vincent Regional Hospital with an always fatal form of brain cancer--a cancer on the right
side of his brain in the middle of the creative processing portion of the brain. In keeping with the idiosyncratic
nature of his life, Bill was not diagnosed in the normal way for such an ailment. Rather, Bill was finally rushed into
the emergency room--those who loved him thought "stroke". The Emergency Room prognosis was instantly clear... his cancer
was huge... far beyond the size routinely seen at the time of initial diagnosis for such a problem. The doctor
was square with Bill, "there is no way to say this.... you have a cancer in your brain and it is BIG."
Bill, of course, knew for great time already, without acknowleding to others, that he was very sick but he did not want
to go to the hospital. Instead he sought to visit the Gulf of California off of Mexico's west Pacific Coast one final
time--say just San Carlos or Guaymas Bay--no need to get fancy or take the longer drive for Topolobampo or
San Blas--these were places that he greatly treasured and loved--places he'ld been many times and a million more in the
visual travels of his own imagination. There can be little doubt that a part of him wanted to simply float out to swim
with dolphins--filling his lungs with water and leaving the struggle for life behind. He had no reason to fight for
what he had already completely owned--a life full of his chosen values--beauty, harmony, family and evolutionary thought.
Still, even realizing this, the death process, for this man once coined as king of the "neo-hedonists",
was neither easy for him nor his family. He was graceful and strong into his last illness, remarkably retaining his
intellect and life view all through until he finally succumbed to his cancer on September 2, 2005.
Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, Bill had already foreshadowed his coming death in his final inteview with the Taos
News just several months prior to the rush to the emergency room. He stated: “I’m
a fan of erosion. It removes enough of the old to make room for the new. It leaves a place on the strand for the next
artist among us. Art is the graffiti of change.”
For Bill, his life had come to an end but art, beauty, constant change, erosion, and its ensuing concordant
evolution, could never be defeated for this man. In promoting Woman with Pomegranates,
Bill penned a created definition for the word "Pomegranate" which he defined as symbol of both birth and death as if one.
Never a man to mix his metaphor or doubt matters of his inner belief, Bill accepted death as a mere transition to another
state--a state unknown but certain--a transition of one more step toward his God(s) Unknown. And somehow Bill knew,
too, that there was yet ahead a new unfolding Post Modern Renaissance that, like Moses with the Promised Land, he
would foreshadow--and yet not fully enter. He was, indeed, a prescient man.
That such a great man could meet his death in such profound circumstances of humility and, even, humiliation, is only
in keeping with his synthesis of what others might view as opposites but which he lived as unitary solitary truths--greatness,
humility, and humiliation all rolled into one final transcendent experience of death and birth into a greater cosmos.
The residue of his life is no detritus of struggle or life mistakes but precious nuggets of transcendent vision. His
message and expression not so powerful in Summer as in Winter; the clarity and value of his thought shedding
meaning not so much in fat times but in thin ones.
