Bill Mather

Bill Mather is an internationally known award-winning Painter, Matte Artist, Illustrator, Set Designer and Art Instructor. He began his career at Matte World in 1987, creating traditional matte paintings for the HBO film 'By Dawns Early Light'. This won the fledgling artist an Emmy Award for Best Special Visual Effects on his first professional endeavor. In addition, he received several more Emmy nominations and an Academy Award Nomination in 1993 for his work on Batman Returns. Bill's matte and design work includes movies such as Forrest Gump, Jumanji, Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Men in Black, The Polar Express, War of the Worlds, and recently, Beowulf and Disney’s A Christmas Carol and many more too numerous to mention.
Bill has been a creative force contributing to a wide variety of projects, for companies like Matte World, Disney, Universal Studios and Industrial Light and Magic, where he has worked as a Conceptual Artist and Digital Matte Painter.

Since a lot of his work is done on the computer, Bill enjoys getting out and painting in nature and drawing from life using traditional media. He is also inspired by the fashion image and incorporates that look into his fine art. Painting portraits has always been a satisfying balance to the commercial work he does. His portrait commissions have included Kim Basinger, Esther Williams, Lucille Ball, Kevin Costner, Michael Jordan and many other local clients.

Bill was educated at Syracuse University and the Academy of Art College in San Francisco and continued his involvement with the Academy as a Teacher of Figure Drawing. He continues to go to figure drawing classes at every opportunity.
He now works at Dreamworks Animation as a senior Matte Artist.

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