I was walking today, thinking about how things have happened in my life. So much wasn’t planned. Things came along, I stepped into them, and before I knew it, I was doing it for better or worse.
Looking back, I’m amazed at how things worked out. But they weren’t always glory days. I didn’t always know where I was going or whether things would work out.
I kept doing it while making course corrections along the way. Now I’m spending more time thinking about what comes next, but I’m already doing what I want to do.
I’ve been noticing something similar in my drawings. Working with pen and ink makes me slow down. Every line matters. I have to look at what’s happening, think about what I’m doing, and decide where the next line goes.
It challenges me.
Maybe that’s why being present came to mind today. Whether I’m drawing or walking, there’s something about paying attention to what’s happening around me. I guess that is called presence.
I have confidence in sunshine,
I have confidence in rain.
I have confidence that spring will come again!
Besides which, you see, I have confidence in me!
When I was teaching, my students used to get a kick out of the fact that every once in a while I would break into song.
One of my favorites was I Have Confidence from The Sound of Music.
I’ve been thinking about that song lately. I’ve also been thinking about confidence, trust, and résumés.
A résumé can list what I’ve done. It can remind me of exhibitions, teaching, projects, and accomplishments. But confidence doesn’t come from a list of what I’ve already done.
It comes from trusting what I can do next.
I’ve been working on a new series of small drawings and paintings, and I’m pleased to say that some of them will be going to New York in December for Collective Z’s Small Works show.
I’m excited to be showing with Collective Z again. It’s a wonderful small gallery, and I’ve really enjoyed working with Alex Z. Wang.
Will every piece I make be the best piece I’ve ever made? Probably not.
That’s not really the point.
Whatever comes out of that process, it will be the best of me.
Bill Hendricks
Three works in progress from the Small Works series, 2026. Pen and ink on paper.
Collective Z is a contemporary gallery and project space on Broome Street in New York, dedicated to artists working in states of transition, tension, and becoming.
Pipe Fitters, 2026, Mixed media on paper, Bill Hendricks
Maybe it started with something I heard at Meeting this weekend about being slow to anger. The message was partly about animals and how uncomplicatedly they can love us. But my mind went somewhere else.
If you want to be loved, love.
If you want people to be kind to you, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
It sounds terribly simple. Maybe too simple. But I keep coming back to the idea that eventually it isn’t what we say about ourselves that matters. It’s how we behave.
Quakers don’t ask each other for résumés before we sit together in worship. We don’t list our accomplishments before standing to speak. At least we shouldn’t have to.
And yet I have a résumé.
I moved myself to New York when I was young and somehow built a life there. I finished my bachelor’s degree and figured out a way to do it for next to nothing. I ran a gallery in Midtown Manhattan and increased its sales. Later, Michael and I had our own business. Michael worked his tail off to help make it succeed.
Then HIV changed our lives.
We closed the business and moved back to Minnesota. Somehow, through that enormous transition, neither of us lost our medical insurance. That may not sound like much today, but at the time it was a feat.
I went back to work.
Eventually I found myself teaching full-time at Minneapolis College. I stayed for more than twenty years. I helped build a department. I earned my graduate degree while working another job to help pay for it.
Woo-hoo.
There. I gave you the résumé.
But none of that is really the point.
A résumé pulls together the pieces of a life. It’s simple Gestalt. You don’t see all the individual pieces anymore. You see the overall shape.
It makes a life look planned.
Mine wasn’t.
There were good decisions and bad ones. Things I worked hard for and things that happened almost by accident. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I screwed up. Sometimes my own behavior probably made things harder than they needed to be.
That’s the life.
And maybe that brings me back to the message I heard at Meeting.
If you want love, love.
If you want kindness, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
Who I am isn’t my résumé.
Behavior tells that story.
In the end, which matters more—the résumé or how you live your life?
“I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head.” —Attributed to El Greco
When I was asked to do a show in Second Life, I decided to go back to an older body of work. I didn’t want to make a new show just for the sake of making something new. I wanted to look again at work that still had something to say to me.
Words I Cannot Spell started several years ago at Hunt & Gather, a wonderful old junk shop in Minneapolis. I saw a pile of letters stacked on top of one another. I stopped and looked at them.
I thought, that’s how I see words.
I started taking photographs.
But the photographs were too perfect. The camera knew exactly where every letter was supposed to be. I don’t always see them that way.
I began to have fun. I jumbled things up to more or less replicate what a page sometimes looks like to me—with a dash of anxiety and confusion thrown in.
That is what interested me about bringing these pieces back for the Second Life exhibition.
I was very appreciative of the opportunity to show this body of work again. The work is older, but the experience behind it is still very much a part of how I see.
Lately I have been doing a lot more writing—articles, agendas, reflections, and writing about my artwork. Maybe that’s why I found myself thinking about those letters again and about how I see words.
Showing this work again gave me another opportunity to give the viewer a little insight into how I experience the world through dyslexia.
Sometimes older artwork just needs another place and another time to speak.
From the series “Words I Cannot Spell,” by Bill Hendricks.
