The artist was a little apprehensive about meeting the superstar.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
He had heard he could be difficult at times.
Then they sat down together one afternoon at the ballpark and the artist brought out a drawing he had done of the superstar. And perhaps for one of the few times in his young life, Ken Griffey Jr. was rendered almost speechless.
He studied the drawing with appreciation in his eyes and in his demeanor, handling it like he would a new-born baby.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
Then he softly said something that put the artist at ease. “I wish I could draw.”
And Bill Abell responded, “I wish I could play baseball.”
That was more than 12 years ago. The superstar no longer shines. The artist keeps getting better.
He still doesn’t charge enough for his work: Thirty-five dollars for a print in which he invests up to 70 hours.
“I like for people to be able to afford it,” Abell said one afternoon in his home near Monroe. “I get a thrill out of people having one of my pictures hanging in their house.”
Anyone owning one of Bill Abell’s prints gets a thrill out of having it grace the walls of their home, be it that of a sports figure or a musician such as Willie Nelson.
The 52-year-old ex-cop is a master craftsman.
Just ask Kelly May, owner of the Fusions Gallery at Ocean Shores. “He’s incredible,” said May, who has more than 60 artists’ works on display in her gallery. “I am honored to have him here.”
Abell visited her gallery while on vacation last year, and happened to have some of his drawings with him. “The time he came in was around Harley Weekend and he had some motorcycle pictures with him,” she said. “I got very excited about them.”
Abell, a very humble man, wasn’t sure his sports art would sell in an upscale gallery like this one. “I was wrong,” he said, almost apologetically.
May acknowledged that his work sells consistently, and there are times when he has “killer months.” She has artists who are in the top five in sales every month and Abell is starting to make a strong move on them.
His work is also shown at the Dertier Shoppe in Leavenworth, and it’s been a consistent seller there as well, according to owner Richard Weaver.
Anyone who has seen Abell’s drawings would agree that they ought to be in shops all over the Northwest, if not the entire country. It’s getting him to promote himself that’s the hangup. “Marketing,” he said with a hangdog expression. “That’s the part I struggle with.”
Part of the artist’s temperament is self-doubt. “Oh, yeah, that’s not unusual,” said his wife, Nancy. “He tends to undervalue his work.”
A large body of his work includes sports figures, baseball players, football players, basketball players. He is selective about his subjects. “He draws what inspires him,” his wife said.
Griffey, obviously, inspired him. And he inspired Griffey. For after Junior looked at the portrait of himself, he asked to see some more of Abell’s work.
He has drawn the immortals. Ernie Banks. Shoeless Joe Jackson. Stan Musial. Ted Williams.
And last year he did a splendid piece on Edgar Martinez. It’s three pictures in one. There’s a side view of Martinez batting, the muscular left forearm ready to uncoil. There’s a frontal view of Martinez with sunglasses and a growth of stubble on his face, relaxed, perhaps heading for the clubhouse after a spring training game. And there’s a rear view of old No.11 walking into retirement, his head bowed and his right arm raised high with his batting helmet in hand.
It captures the man perfectly. So life-like that you half expect Edgar to turn, look you squarely in the eye and say, “I just try to do my best.”
“I really enjoyed doing that one because it was like a tribute to him retiring,” Abell said. “He’s really going to be missed because he was a real gentleman and we need more players like that. Of course, it really helps when you’re a gentleman and a good ballplayer.”
To practice his art, Abell employs a method called stippling. Which, essentially, consists of layers and layers of dots. And patience, lots of patience.
Sometimes, when he doesn’t get a drawing just right, he’ll rip it out and tear it up. “Sometimes there’s some little piece that’ll bug him,” Nancy said.
In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, Abell started to draw the New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady. Then the doubts set in. “Sometimes you reach a point where you’re not sure about it,” Abell said.
He conferred with the in-house critic. “It’s fine,” Nancy said. “It’s a great drawing. Leave it alone.”
It’ll be done soon, hanging, perhaps, on a wall near you.
Abell sometimes doesn’t realize the impact his art has on people until he comes face-to-face with them. One time at an art show in Monroe, he looked up from what he was doing and saw a man studying one of his football drawings that featured a Seattle Seahawk kicking a field goal.
“Hey,” Abell said, doing a doubletake, “you’re Norm Johnson.”
Abell overcame his shyness to ask Johnson to autograph the drawing of himself and some of his teammates.
Johnson hesitated momentarily, sending the wrong message to Abell. “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to,” he quickly added.
“I just don’t want to screw up a piece of artwork,” Johnson said.
At a show in Leavenworth, Abell had a drawing of an American flag, a GI and three Vietnamese children walking past a puddle. The reflection was of three Viet Cong.
An American soldier stood looking at the drawing. There were tears in his eyes.
One of Abell’s pictures that was put on display at the Ocean Shores gallery was of a man on a Harley-Davidson. During Harley Weekend last July, a number of riders dropped into the gallery specifically to take a look at the drawing.
When Willie Nelson performed at the Evergreen State Fair, someone arranged for the two artists to meet so that Abell could present a portrait to him. When Nelson looked at the drawing, it must have been like the country-western singer looking into a mirror, the spitting image of himself looking back, pigtails and all.
Abell did a drawing of the 1995 Mariners, that magic team that took the Cleveland Indians to the sixth game of the American League Championship Series. There is Martinez and Griffey and Buhner and Cora and Wilson and Piniella …
They stole the hearts of many baseball fans. And then they got stolen.
The portrait was taken from a gallery in Mill Creek. A reward was offered and the picture was left in a beauty salon in the same mall. “I can claim I’ve been a victim of art theft,” laughed Abell, who, ironically, was assistant chief in the Monroe Police Department until his retirement in 1999 with a medical disability.
He had also been a forensic artist with the department. “I could take a photo of someone when he was five years old and age him five years,” he said.
He had begun drawing in junior high, starting with Marvel Comicbook characters. “I doodled a lot in high school,” he recalled. “My English teacher my senior year of high school used to give me C’s for my essays and A’s for my doodling.”
The teacher was Donnetta Walser, who later retired from the classroom and went into politics. She is currently the mayor of Monroe.
“Bill was extremely bright,” Walser said, “but he expressed himself better in art than he did in writing.”
And he got higher grades for it? Yes, she said, he did.
She kept some of his drawings and gave them to his mother because many of them had been destroyed by his father.
Abell’s dad was a career military man. “Saturday mornings when I was young, he would come in and inspect my bedroom,” Abell said. “Everything had to be spit and polished.”
His father didn’t approve of his son doing artwork. That was for girls. “He took everything I drew and burned it,” Abell said.
That didn’t stop him from drawing, though. Nor did it stop his dad from disdaining what his son did. “I had a picture of Jimi Hendrix on my wall when I was in high school,” Abell said, “and he came in and ripped it off.”
Did they ever reconcile? “A little bit,” Abell said. “One of the last times I saw him before he died he saw some of my work and said, ‘You did do something with that talent.’”
Abell doesn’t restrict his art to people subjects. He has drawn elk, moose, bear and wolves, among other animals. “We make a killing with (animal pictures during) the hunting season,” May said with no pun intended. “During NASCAR season, we can’t keep his NASCAR pictures.”
She sold one of his originals, that of a fly fisherman, just two months ago.
Once the Tom Brady project is finished, he is anxious to get started on another quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck of the Seahawks. “I love that guy,” Abell said.
Through various connections in the Monroe Police Department, he has been able to get a number of his works autographed by the people he drew. One woman used to babysit the quarterback Randall Cunningham. “I got one autograph as an Eagle and one as a Viking,” Abell said triumphantly.
Another lady’s father was a college roomate of Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, and arranged for him and Abell to get together after a Sonics game. One of Abell’s fellow officers was a cousin of the quarterback Troy Aikman.
Abell has a sleep disorder and sometimes gets up in the middle of the night to pick up his pencil and go to work. “I draw in spurts,” he said. “Sometimes I get writer’s block. Other times I get into what Nancy calls a ‘drawing frenzy’ and I’ll do it every night.”
His easiest work comes when he does a drawing for himself. The commission stuff is another matter.
“It’s hard to do,” he said, “because you don’t know what their expectations are.”
“He finds that rather painful,” Nancy said.
You’d never know it.
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