William Ivey (painter)

Young Ivey often visited the Seattle Art Museum after its 1933 opening near his grandfather's house, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

After graduating from Broadway High School he attended the University of Washington as a law student, while also taking drawing classes at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Ivey went into the Army, trained as a commando in the First Special Service Force, and served in the Aleutians, Africa, Italy, and France.

In 1954 Ivey, Jack Stangle, Ward Corley, and Richard Gilkey were featured in an exhibition of Northwest avant-gardists at SAM.

[3] While Ivey was gaining recognition, and was able to quit his day job, he was notorious for his reluctance to attend opening parties, do publicity, or seek out commissions, and for his gruff, workmanlike approach to painting.

[2] Distaste for promotion likely limited Ivey's popularity – his one and only European exhibition, arranged by painter John Franklin Koenig, was at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1966 – but he remained a respected, strong-selling artist in the Pacific Northwest.

SAM held another solo show of his work in 1975; in 1982 he accepted a rare commission and created the largest painting of his career (20' x 8') for the King County District Court in Issaquah, Washington;[2][5] in 1983 he was named Artist of the Year by the King County (Washington) Arts Commission, and used the $25,000 reward to build a studio behind his home in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood;[1] in 1989 the Henry Art Gallery presented a major retrospective of his career.

However, his deeply personal style of abstraction showed more of the influence of Still, Rothko, and others he studied under at the California School of Fine Arts.

He found inspiration in observation of the real world, but his intense immersion in the painting process transformed what he saw into lush abstractions that emphasized color and the picture plane.