Bill Tavis bio

Trippy fractal halftone hand waving with tracers by TAVIS

About my art

Halftones create the illusion of grayscale values by varying the width of a black and white pattern. They are ubiquitous in commercial printing where the halftone pattern is made as small as possible. The idea behind my art is to enlarge the halftone pattern enough to make the pattern itself highly visible, but not so much that the overall image is lost, finding that balance where a new meaning is created out of the juxtaposition of the two. I have worked hard to hone my skills at drawing the halftones completely by hand, while simultaneously I have developed sophisticated computer algorithms to create halftones with complex patterns such as fractals. Please enjoy looking through my website - you can use the menu above to check out more of my work!


TAVIS spraypaint halftone mural black and white

About Me

I'm an artist currently living in Austin, TX. I've moved around a few places but I grew up in Albuquerque, NM where I was exposed to rich cultural history and plenty of fractal vistas. I excelled at math as a kid, but by high school I really didn't enjoy it and I hated the idea of doing that for the rest of my life. I could feel something else stirring in me that needed to happen, but I didn't understand what it was at the time. When I graduated all I knew is that I loved to snowboard so I decided to make a career out of filming snowboard movies. I took some video classes, and in the matter of a couple months everything changed - catalyzed by an injury, a new romantic relationship, and some special mushrooms. I discovered a love for image-making and I was able to see for the first time that being an artist was a viable path for me to go down. All of my bottled up emotions came flooding out after years and years of stuffing them down. In all the time since then, I have never looked back from being an artist or doubted that it was for me. I've gone in many different directions with my art, from writing graffiti to writing code, but it's always done with the same passion. I studied drawing, photography, painting, and I eventually went to school for animation and worked at a studio for several years. The funny thing is, after more than 15 years of following my creative bliss it has led me directly back to the very things I tried to get away from - mathematics and programming, which I now make extensive use of in my artistic process. Perhaps the greatest thing I have learned on this journey of art is to love and embrace those other parts of myself, and now I enjoy them in balance with my creativity.