Bill Tavis bio

Trippy fractal halftone hand waving with tracers by TAVIS

About my art

I create work in a style I’ve coined Halftonism, which involves the artistic use of halftones. Halftones are a mechanical process used in commercial printing, where a repeating on/off pattern (often small dots) creates the illusion of smooth gradients. I’ve taken this concept  and made it expressive by scaling up the pattern. When my art is seen up close, the pattern dominates the viewer’s experience, but from a distance the underlying image emerges. The pattern itself can take various forms—lines, fractals, symbolism, or even text—as long as it maintains an approximately even spacing. It’s this juxtaposition between the pattern and the image that gives my work deeper meaning. I have worked hard to hone my skills at painting 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 3D medical animation studio for several years. This 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, allowing me to finally embrace those other parts of myself. At the end of 2019, after a lifetime of atheism and decades of spiritual seeking, I repented to God and gave my life to following Jesus Christ as Lord, and in August of 2020 I was baptized as a Christian. Everything I had been looking for spiritually was finally fulfilled in the simple truth of the Gospel. My artistic practice and halftone style remained on track undeterred but what I desire to express with my art has shifted. Since that time, my overarching hope with my art is to glorify God, and I pray that I improve in this as time goes on.