Hello. My name is Wil Stegenga.  I am an artist. My parents and grandparents on both sides of my family tree were all artists….the only world I’ve known.

I must create! Hard driven. It is essential for my expression to flow with rivers of emotion carried out to sea. In every area of my life, this is true.  I have found that when there is restriction, or holding back, or lack of a positive, creative outlet, or communication, my mind tends to wander into unpleasant experience. Even there—I create—drama upon a stage, perhaps, until I regain my true senses and extra-sensories again in the stillness of imagination forming and swirling all around and through me. There is so much to learn about ourselves.

“All who wander are not lost.”

I’ve tried many mediums. And, realized long ago that my most preferred is pen and ink and certainly scribbling and teaching others to do the same!

A magical day it was when I received my first correspondence from my publisher with an offer of a contract, a specified sum of money, and details of my first book!

My first book! Ages ago. I remember clearly this letter was dated late one day in August—coincidentally my birthday almost two decades ago! Finally, I was given the opportunity to share, from that energy which came through my heart from the ethers onto paper, to share with the entire world—an expanding international audience who appreciated my work.

However, I intimately remembered the starving artist. Craving creation and expression from my heart through my hands. The necessity to create for my own survival. Once upon a time, attached to the approval or disapproval of at least one other person to bear witness to my work. This all began to bloom in the early ‘80s. I was in Manhattan, on the upper west side. I remember printing copies of my most recent patterns and I would walk around my neighborhood with a bottle of glue in one hand, and in the other, a stack of designs, including mandalas, geometric patterns, and whatever else I was deeply compelled to stick onto the wall of the nearest brownstone; covering it with my personal brand of wallpaper….All so that I could share of myself with whomever walked by—everyone in fact. Usually my exhibits would be removed within 24 hours! Or, rather, a painful attempt was made to peel them off, which never really worked. At least someone saw them.

As I grew out of my teen years, I found it much more rewarding to create beautiful flyers. Mostly, the flyers consisted of a dazzling array of 3-D art, allover patterns, graphics, facets, florals, plaids, grids, and paisleys rendered and arranged with an impeccable sense of symmetry. These flyers of course were distributed personally, as if, I was employed by a pizzeria offering a buy one get one free special!  . . . I stood on high traffic street corners and offered my copyright free and royalty free art. At the time it was hard to imagine many recipients of my creative gifts actually understanding me and what I was really up to as a growing artist. After all, there was no contact information, no telephone numbers, or much more than intense, powerful, deeply felt art available on these prolific advertisements! Finally…out of my imagination and onto paper. Deliberate ink. Released from the confines of my very willful mind. Just beautiful, boundless prints. Note cards in an other-worldly language of shape and form.

Years later, I splashed my confetti silk-screened art all over the once small town of Santa Cruz, California.  Everyone knew me as the young, talented, yet disturbed—artist. Born to cut stencils and use them in hopes of forming structure and security in my life where I was raised with neither. Art was my shelter. Mostly, I received stares of fear and intrigue from my public audience, coupled with the occasional smile from a fellow artist.

“Source as my infinite supply.”

The basic shapes I saw everywhere, on everyone, in everything, scribed onto anything I could find, usually became disposed gift wrap! An experience of art to fill the memory with no trace of its tangible remains. My aim was to inspire my brethren to use these flyers for their own arts and crafts projects and hobbies. For the most part I found my collages turned into litter before my very eyes, lining the streets, just like art deco tiles or art nouveau linoleum covering the floors of a once grand house. 

Occasionally, a friend would give me back one of my etchings in the form of a beautifully folded shape of an animal or some other technically advanced and well thought out piece of origami. For years I, too, would use these flyers as gift wrap for small items I offered to friends on special occasions. I became a mobile gallery!

With deep appreciation, I remember a fellow artist who loved to use some of my designs for her personal coloring projects. It was the first time I had been so well received by a compatriot artist improving their craft as well.

Now, decades later, I have found true alignment and well-being within the creative process, through sacred geometry, yantras, mandalas, and a limitless array of shape and form. I barely sleep from the flow of energy I am graced with these days. Images shower my being with wildflowers and star bursts spontaneously blooming and spreading all over a wide expanse in a kaleidoscopic dance…a vast and inspired wellspring of images to capture in one lifetime. Grace.

My images at times are inter-dimensional maps. Some identical to those found in the open fields of Europe and other countries of my original origin fill my creative spaces hungry for expression. Fractal forms from the heavens. Mysterious designs. Crop circles. Nordic lore re-examined. Reduced to pen and ink.

Watch for the newest hand-drawn line-art and Celtic and geometric collections right here at this site….

Inspired by nature, in crystalline deposits, snowflakes and minerals, forms of my imagination spill onto weighted paper. I have rediscovered basic shapes. Circles. Squares. Ovals. Rectangles. Triangles. Octagons. Hexagons. Ellipses. Stars. Diamonds. Life’s building blocks in simple complexity. Nature arranged for visceral impact. Visual pleasure.

Long ago, I began making my own hand-cut stencils so that I could expand my capacity far beyond anything that could be purchased at my favorite art stores. I especially enjoy stretching basic shapes and animating them to create images that change the page. Through my hands hundreds of versions of hearts, paisleys, teardrops, tangents, trajectories, spheres, and parallel shaped images allow my creative process to come forth.

Many years have passed since I’ve committed my life’s work to a medium of intricate, concentric, interlocking line-art. And, as my styles and skills have progressed, evolving and becoming more entirely unique—so have I. No excuses. No regrets. No place to go back to. No longer am I the starving artist I once was. I fondly look back at my bittersweet beginnings as a sensitive artist born into a crude world now washed away to memory and artistic bliss in present moments in my studio with welcomed blocks of dedicated time to create and share beauty.

Recently, I realized I was an anonymous part of artistic history in Greenwich village and Soho galleries and studios where Warhol, Keith Harring, and Basquiat and others who quickly rose to fame and then died with the same swiftness within a span of two or three years, as nearly I did. I was there. . . riding the same undercurrent of creative energy they and many others were. I, too, was destined to “crash and burn,” yet somehow my life force was stronger than the cement and steel of that great city and I was free to escape the same fate of many of my colleagues! As they were true artists of their time now immortalized in the pages of history, I carry the pen in the same way a tri-athlete runs with his bright torch through life, as the true bearer of the drive to achieve the deepest connection to the beauty of humanity and being alive through art.

In order to be an artist, for what it’s worth, to really embrace its essence in who we are, it is simply to reach out simultaneously with outstretched arms and a yearning heart aching to be filled. In this way, we all share in the creative process—one form or another, one way or another, in our own time and place in our spirit’s evolution. Energy. Home. Love. Power. Beauty. Life. By this very process we are joined with ink, color, or any other medium of our choosing from which all life is drawn.

With Love and Appreciation,

Wil Stegenga
Artist

© 1990-2009 Wil Stegenga for MandalaMagnets.com. All rights reserved.