Bill Indursky's Profile

I really appreciate all the feedback. Here are a few answers to some of the questions that people are asking:

- The two desks are custom designed by myself. I looked at every desk on-line and off to find one that was really narrow (12"-18"). There are not many console desks out there. So i got two reclaimed wood pedestals ($450 each at ABC Carpet & Home) with a custom live edge table top mounted in between (from my friends at Olde Good Things for $175) for a total of $1075 each desk. The desk chair is from West Elm.

- As for all "the dead thing" paintings, I am a Classical Realist painter ( http://williameric.com ) and most of my work is still life. It comes from a long tradition (about 600 years or so) of painting still life. The skull paintings are my fascination with VANITAS, a particular type of still life painting popular in the 1600s. They were painted mostly during the Black Plague, especially by Dutch artists, to signify how fleeting and ephemeral life can be (It helped that there were a lot of dead bodies in the streets in which to get the skulls - since they burned the infected). Our cultural association with skulls today is very different - we think of them as haunted or spooky - but to me, who paints from real life, spending 40 hours staring at a still life set up or more, they are quite beautiful. The "dead rooster" painting is a famous important American artist that I am currently writing a book on, Emil Carlsen. I know it was trendy for a while, because of artists like Damien Hirst to draw and paint skulls, but I was painting them long before I knew who Damien was. He does it for shock - I do it to continue a 600 year old tradition.