Bad Drawing Series

Since Professor Walmsley actually began as a painter, one of his favorite observations is that “litho is a painter’s medium.” It is, of course, technically demanding—skills that he essentially taught himself. Art Department Head Gulnar Bosch challenged him to create a litho studio from the ground up. Drafted into becoming the lithography instructor at Florida State University (his only training a one-year graduate course years earlier), he said “I did all right: being the student as well as the teacher, I didn’t flunk out.”

Before Florida State University, he had already taught a total of nine academic seasons—everything from core courses to art history at Howard College in Birmingham, Alabama (1953-56), and at Murray State College in Murray, Kentucky (1956-1962). In the Fall of 1962, he and his wife Dorothy and daughter Mary made Tallahassee their new home. From then until his retirement in 1989, William Aubrey Walmsley quietly built his national reputation—earning recognition for his prints all over the country.