Hi. My name is Bill Blizard, retired from
36 years as a faculty member and Chairman of the Visual and Performing
Arts Department at Springfield College. I now have a
new home and a wonderful
studio that catches the generous northern light here in South Carolina,
USA.
The Blues clicked with me in the 1950’s, just
heading away from home to college and on my own for the first time.
Marilyn, the woman who became my wife, had separately found the Blues in
an archival library. It had a music room with John and Alan Lomax
recordings. Was this what made our marriage intertwine so well? Who knows?
As is often said, “It can’t hurt.”
I studied art at the
State University of New York at Buffalo and completed graduate work in art at
New York University in Manhattan. From 1955 and onward, my art has been selected
by numerous local, national and international art exhibits. My work is in both
private and corporate collections.
Building and administrating the Arts
Department at Springfield had me dividing my time so that my professional
responsibilities had to often take priority over my creative studio time. During
nearly half a century, my love of the Blues kept growing. This music, with its
up front funky spirit, picks up one’s soul and tosses it paradoxically into a
sense of joy and hopefulness despite facing difficult times. Our twenty-first
century world needs this kind of spirit.
