William A Hall
Will has drawn and made art for as long as he can remember. He maintains that he 
really learnt art on his own, though he enjoyed art lessons through his school 
years. Art school might have beckoned, but his family didn’t have the money to 
send him. This is not something he regrets. He figured he would just get on with 
making art anyway. Indeed, there is generally an easy-going stoicism in Will’s char­
acter that looks first for the positives when he reflects on experience. As he says, as 
a homeless person, where one lives a day at a time, if he hadn’t been an optimist, 
he wouldn’t have survived. He had various jobs over the years, usually things like 
gardening or working in nurseries – again pointing to a fundamentally nurturing 
disposition. But art making was the only thing that really motivated him. 
Will lived with his mother until her passing in 1997. Unable to keep up payments on 
the house, he found himself homeless. He had, he says, a bicycle and 8 cents in his 
pocket. Going to the cheap stores to buy what he could, he would then make draw­
ings on the backs of receipts. He says that he found it relatively easy to make the 
transition, having known people on the streets before: “I was kind of drawn to 
them.” He learnt a lot in his new situation – about homelessness and about addic­
tion. Always concerned to help people, he found voluntary work and shelter with 
the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence for two years, working 
with clients, helping out. “I’d had abuses, too,” he tells us, “but I’d had six years of so­
briety already before I went there.” 
In 2000 he found himself homeless again and decided to travel across the US on a 
bus. Arriving in Indianapolis he found he didn’t like it. He decided to head back to 
his roots, to LA. 
All of the time he had continued making art, leaving much in a paid storage facility. 
However, when he couldn’t keep up payments for the storage, this work, as with 
other earlier things appears to have been lost. Such is the precariousness of life as 
a homeless person. 
Sometime after his return to LA someone gave Will his first car. 
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