William Neville

September 5, 2025
Susan Brubaker Knapp
Blog, Furniture, Painting, Sculpture, Wood

Caseworks – Chapel Hill

This is one in a series of posts about artists in the Orange County Artists Guild.

What is your medium? Why do you love it? How did you get interested in it?

As a young man I was making oil paintings, and the fine arts were my first love. The decorative Arts came later. In my junior year of collage while working on a Fine Arts major, my mother handed me one thousand dollars, instructing me to “Take the summer off and go to the Louvre in Paris.” An amazing gesture for a woman who was working nights to put her fourth child through collage. I did not take it lightly, and to this day in my 74th year, it is my intention to get up every morning and make something new.

How did your career evolve?

Caseworks has been my brand for 40 years. I am a master furniture maker. As my skills developed, I began building contract furniture. That is, designing and fabricating furniture pieces for individual clients and commercial concerns. Clients and media branded this work as “furniture art.” This work has kept me very busy for many years. As I was coming into my sixties, I began looking back at a painting practice that I had set aside to make a living.

Tell us about your studio.

My wife and I are both artists, and both of us have very diverse practices, in a number of different media. Our loft in Southern Village acts as home, studio, and gallery, where we do two major exhibitions a year. We use the sales from these events to fund our passion for travel and discovery – fodder for our continual habit of creating.

Do you have formal training in your medium?

I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Western Michigan University 1973. Following the BFA I did post graduate work at Arizona State University. In my fourth semester while in Arizona I realized that the idea of teaching art in a university setting was at that time a fool’s dream. So I quit school and decided to get busy in the world and become a maker… From that point forward I have been self taught.