While apprenticed as a cabinet maker, Willy took evening and weekend courses at the Kölner Werkschulen / Cologne School of Applied Arts, where he met artists Heinrich Hoerle and Anton Räderscheidt, who later along with him co-founded the art-political group, Stupid.

The Fick music evenings where Willy played piano or violin with his siblings, often turned into heated political discussions.

Social Democratic Party of Germany would not vote for war credits in 1914, but when it did, Willy Fick registered as a conscientious objector.

[3] Willy's acquaintanceship circle enlarged during the war to include Otto Freundlich and Carl Oskar Jatho, both of whom had returned early from the front.

Fairy-tale like watercolours from this period show the hope for a better world that was soon dashed by the dire post-World War I situation and by the death of his sister Angelika Hoerle who died of tuberculosis at 23 years of age.

His dark works in which human simulacra float in a void and where life is played on or by a checkered board, were influenced by Surrealism, Neue Sachlichkeit and the Cologne Progressives.

"[6] In 1927, Richard Riemerschmidt, director of the Kölner Werkschulen championed Fick so that he received a tuition-free scholarship thanks to Mayor of Cologne Konrad Adenauer.

Thorn-Prikker's most significant impact on Fick's art was his lifelong interest in transparency and his love of colour experiments that looked like stained glass.

In 1932 the constellation of the short-lived "Gruppe 32" comprising glass painter Ludwig Egidius Ronig, Neue Sachlichkeit artist Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, and Fick's dada-time friends Seiwert, Räderscheidt and Hoerle, showed the mixture of Neue Sachlichkeit, glass painting and Progressive interests that blended at that time and in Fick's works as well.

He took the art work he'd salvaged from his sister Angelika Hoerle's apartment and hid it in the garden shed of his atelier in Vogelsang, an outskirt of Cologne.

On the table in front of him is a sheet of paper inscribed with the letters ABDH, a reference to the factory code of the Heinkel He 111, a bomber which began production in 1935 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Thanks to the photos of the Rheinisches Bildarchiv / Rhineland Picture Archive, Fick's strongest works survive as black and white images.

According to Fick's post-war claim for restitution, 40–45 oil paintings and over 70 watercolours and drawings were destroyed in the last years of the war, by the bombing of Cologne on October 31, 1944,[2] and by the March 1945 looting of recently released foreign labourers.

When his only living relative, his nephew Frank Eggert, moved to Whitby, Ontario, Fick began the first of six three-month visits; these took place between 1954 and 1967.

When he retired from the City of Cologne in 1956 Fick travelled extensively, during which time he regaled his Canadian family with illustrated letters.