Bill Zima hails from Chicago and has a rich heritage of working in inks and wax. He relocated to Spain a few years ago and has now settled in Scotland. His work has a Japanese quality and conjures thoughts of Bonsai.Born in 1961 in a small town in Indiana, Bill studied fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He spent a year abroad, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, cultivating his practical skills whilst studying under the “stone-carving master of Europe”. This experience proved to have a profound influence on Bill both personally and professionally.After graduating in 1990 Bill spend the next year perfecting encaustic painting, having been introduced to the material of beeswax in his final year of study. He was immediately drawn to the tactility and translucence of the medium and the romanticism of the surfaces. Early pieces saw him collect the remains of the stone carvings, the stone dust, and mix it with wax to create ethereal figurative pieces. The encaustic imagery evolved to abstraction and eventually took the form of minimalist color field paintings. His technique was unique and took seven years to develop the laborious encaustic process.In 2003 Bill moved to Spain with his family and took a hiatus from the ‘exhibition circuit’, choosing to explore and develop new creative directions to reflect the extraordinary experience of living abroad. Visual vocabulary was refined and expression was explored using patterns to build up an image. Bill then moved to Edinburgh in 2007 where he currently lives with his family. The landscape took Bill back to the very earliest drawings of hills he had done as a three year old…this re-connection inspired the current body of work.