User:Bill DiMichele

BILL DiMICHELE (born June 3, 1865) is a multi-media artist and teacher currently living and working in Northern California. His involvement in the arts spans decades and embraces a broad spectrum of creative endeavors, including drawing, painting, composing, teaching, and creating collages, concrete poetry, and haiku.

Born in the small steel town of Monessen, Pennsylvania, and encouraged by his parents to experiment creatively, he spent most of his time practicing piano and painting. When not working on his own art, he listened to music, analyzed paintings, and read esoteric texts. He attended Bucknell University, then graduated magna cum laude from West Virginia University, where he studied painting with Michael Miketta. In 1980 he and his wife Julie moved to San Francisco. While working as a sales representative for a reprographics company, he met Crag Hill, then a cameraman, and they discovered a mutual love of poetry, the visual arts and wandering through the city in search of experience and new ways of seeing and interpreting life. With Laurie Schneider, they began publishing SCORE, a magazine of visual poetry, and collaborated on various side projects, including sound/text performances, readings, painting exhibits, multi-media installations, and a conceptual band called The Outpatients, with Tom Hammil, Dale Jensen, and Jon Bailiff. During that time, Bill published visual poetry in numerous magazines, and wrote BURNHOLE, a collection of nonlinear prose poems published by Malthus Press. His musical projects include the False Gods, a cyberpunk band with Gover Thompson, Tim Bates and Gary Heffern, Batang Frisco, an LP recorded with guitarist and producer Eric Jensen, live performances with his son Will on bass, and numerous solo projects under the name Billy Dim. In 2005 he released 'Sick Man Teacher Dead Man', an eighty minute collection of interrelated songs dealing with the extremes of human experience, from mental illness, addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, aging, and death, to spirituality, hope, community, and psychic evolution.

His paintings, large colorful abstractions organized in extensive series, focus on discovering new forms of beauty and translating the world beyond illusory reality.