WILLIAM MOYERS, CA
Living in Albuquerque
A member of the Cowboy Artists
of America since 1968 and now a member Emeritus, Bill
Moyers is a painter and sculptor of western subjects. His
work is in numerous major collections including the
Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the National Cowboy
Hall of Fame; the Albuquerque Museum; and the Cowboy
Artists of America at Kerrville. He has won numerous gold
and silver medals and is in prestigious publications
including “Cowboy in Art” by Harmsen and
“Bronzes of the American West,” by Patricia
Broder.
He and his wife Neva, who have been married fifty years,
live in their home in Albuquerque surrounded by the
artifacts of their long life together. At the age of
fourteen, Bill came to Colorado with his father, a lawyer,
who placed him with a family of five boys on a ranch. He
worked his way through high school and college as a cowboy
and began selling pictures of bucking horses for 25 cents
each.
In 1939, he graduated with a degree in fine arts from Adams
State Teachers College in Alamosa and later studied at the
Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles with E. Roscoe Shraeder,
a pupil of illustrator Howard Pyle. To earn extra money, he
worked at Walt Disney Studios for a year on the movie
“Fantasia.”
In 1943, he and Neva married, and he served in the Army and
she in the Navy, and they lived in New York City where he
began illustration, winning an “American
Artist” magazine competition for illustrating an Owen
Wister novel. From that time, his career took off, and Neva
handled the business side but stayed in the Navy until his
success was obvious. The couple lived in Atlanta, Georgia
where he did over 200 illustration assignments, and they
had four children, two of whom are artists--John Moyers,
also a member of the Cowboy Artists of America, and
Charles, a sculptor.
On a summer visit to Taos in 1958, the Moyers met Tom and
Sally Lewis, owners of The Taos Gallery, and they asked
Bill to do paintings for their gallery. It was the
beginning of a long association, which continues to this
day, and to facilitate the relationship, the Moyers moved
to Albuquerque in 1962. Until 1978, the time when Tom Lewis
died, he handled every piece of Moyers’ work
beginning with painting and later sculpture. Since 1966,
Bill estimates he has created more than fifty bronzes.
His work is highly realistic combined with emotional
involvement with the subject and is in the tradition of
Charles Russell and Frederic Remington. Moyers regards his
art as an extension of human experience: “The basic
elements of fear, conflict, hunger, need, and the effects
of weather . . .anyone in the world during any age can
understand (New Mexico Magazine, June
1993).