WILLIAM RUSHING 1936 - 2009 William Everett Rushing was born in Los Angeles and grew up during the Great Depression surrounded by the Paiute Indian reservation near Big Pine, in the Owens Valley of California. His parents were artists, his mother was a landscape painter and his father was an art furniture painter. As a boy, Bill enjoyed drawing and clearly had natural artistic talent. However, as Bill grew taller, eventually to six feet five inches tall, he became a talented basketball player, so much so that he was offered a college scholarship. But inexplicably, rather than go to college, in the middle of his senior year in high school Bill and a friend decided to join the U.S. Navy, where he served on the destroyer the USS Henderson during the Korean War.
In his 30s Rushing decided to seriously pursue a career as an artist. Rushing continued his art education through correspondence classes with the Famous Artists School founded by the New York Society of Illustrators members Albert Dorne and Norman Rockwell. Rushing’s success as a Western artist brought him to the attention of the Governor of Kentucky, who commissioned Rushing as a Kentucky Colonel, the highest title of honor a Kentucky Governor can bestow, for his contribution to Western art. Rushing always credited his talent and success to God-given talent. His preferred medium was watercolor. In each of his paintings his signature is followed by the Christian fish symbol, and somewhere in each painting he included what his wife called “three weeds” that symbolize the three crosses of Christ’s Crucifixion.
After his service in the Navy, Rushing moved to Reno where he took art classes and where he met his wife Peggy. The couple soon moved back near his childhood home in California, and for a few years Rushing worked as a California Highway Patrol Officer. However, the first major accident he was called to that involved children convinced him to look for a different job.
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