William Talmadge Hall

“As an Illustrator, I’m also a story teller. My intense interest in history and my experience with life on the water has enabled me to concentrate on the way life actually worked in a given time and environment. These human observations and life’s experiences find their way into all my paintings.

My father was a Harpoon Swordfisherman from Block Island, Rhode Island until he was eighteen. His heritage gave me access to the inner aspects of Island life and the business of commercial fishing.

When my father moved our family to Thetford, Vermont I was blessed to be a part of a rural farming community and attended a one room school house. In those years I developed an interest in painting and became an observer and chronicler of, “people working”,- This I describe as, “real people doing non heroic work”. This theme has become the basis of how I observe life and why I pick the subjects I paint.