Bill Witherspoon is a visual artist and serial entrepreneur. As an artist, over the last four decades, Bill has mounted 40 one-man exhibitions of paintings, prints, and sculptures (1968 – 2020), in addition to desert public art projects. As an entrepreneur he founded Sky Factory, a fine arts, digital technology, and family-run studio that designs and manufactures research-verified, biophilic illusions of nature.
Bill created Sky Factory’s design framework, Open Sky Technology, leveraging applied Neuroaesthetics to create illusory architectural portals that engage areas of the brain associated with depth perception and spatial cognition. His lifelong love of the sky, our most universal experience of nature, led him to capture its spatial attributes through insightful design, mirroring Nature as Life and Beauty as Truth.
In his six decades, living for long stretches in the High Steppe desert in southeastern Oregon, he has painted watercolor skies, practiced ancient art as spiritual discipline, and weathered the solitary geological expanse. Bill has been profiled in Fast Company, Inc., and The Wall Street Journal. He was also recognized by Planetree, the pioneering organization for Patient Centered Care, as Scholar of the Year (2017) for his contributions to the patient experience.
In Enter Space—Stories from the High Desert, his 1st book, he bears witness to a life surrounded by that rare, unsummoned vastness—one that few among us, steeped in the ceaseless churn of urban life, can only imagine living but through the faithful record of the artist’s experience.
