Saratoga News

Photograph by Edmund Lee

Artist Bill Fravel uses his favorite medium, watercolor, to portray his favorite scenes, which include seascapes and landscapes.

Artist looks to nature for inspiration

By Shari Kaplan

Davenport resident Bill Fravel's moment of reckoning--at least in terms of what would become a long painting career--came shortly after his graduation from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in architecture.

He worked for a time for an architectural firm, but found himself drifting outside so often to draw and paint that it became clear the vocation in which he earned his degree was not for him. Fravel clinched his decision after he opted out of taking the exam for his architect's license. After that, it was nothing but full steam ahead for Fravel, a self-taught artist who paints only in his favorite medium: watercolor.

A variety of paintings are on display at Saratoga's Aegis Gallery, where Fravel is the featured artist for August. The images, which he calls a fanciful blend of realism and impressionism, consist mainly of landscapes and seascapes. Although these are drawn from Santa Cruz County and Hawaii, Fravel is also known for depictions of the Sierra, the San Francisco Bay and other areas of natural beauty that catch his eye and his paintbrush.

"I've always been good at drawing and have a good visual sense, and I've always been the one in a group who people come to for creative ideas," says Fravel, who as a boy dreamed of being a Disney cartoonist.

"I didn't do any drawing in high school, though. I was more of a jock," he says. He did, however, enjoy doodling all over his papers, he recalls.

Although he and his family lived in San Francisco and Oakland for many years, the Santa Cruz native eventually returned to his coastal roots and took up residence in Davenport. In 1996, he and wife Marilyn opened Whale Hedge Studio at 51 Ocean St. to showcase Fravel's growing collecting of watercolors as well as works from other local artists.

The Davenport studio takes its name from bushes the fun-loving Fravel pruned into a giant whale. Sometimes he even rigs a garden hose through the bushes and gives the whale a water-spouting "blowhole."

Simply traveling along Highway 1 from Davenport for a shopping trip in Santa Cruz or Capitola can inspire a painting. In "Another Trip to Safeway," Fravel shows rolling green fields dotted with wildflowers in the foreground and backdropped by blue hills. Fog and clouds are swept overhead by ocean breezes into large, fluffy billows. Sometimes he'll travel up and down the highway, waiting until the lighting is just right before he captures the scene on camera film and later, on canvas.

"You never know what you're going to see out here," he says. "This area is like anything on the California coast--it's beautiful. Davenport is one of the last undeveloped places like this. It's spectacular."

Other scenes in the exhibition include a woman frolicking in the waters of a sheltered cove in "Buffy Does Pigeon Point;" lushly verdant fingers of Hawaiian land reaching into the ocean in "Hana Green, Maui;" and "Shiny, Happy Boat" in which a small wooden boat in a garage sits illuminated by the sun's rays, ready to take to the water soon again.

Aegis Gallery is located at 14531 Big Basin Way, Unit 2. For gallery hours or other information, call 867-0171.

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