Ferehawk’s foray: Architect, Hollywood art director, documentary filmmaker, and now painter – Bill Frehawk follows his creative impulse wherever it leads him (even the middle of Pico Boulevard)

by Alex Khatchadourian
08/18/2025

Before the trash trucks start clamoring down the residential streets and the typical mayhem of Los Angeles morning traffic ensues, Bill Ferehawk quietly leaves his Mid City home to wander Pico Boulevard.

Wielding a window-washing pole with a digital camera strapped to the end, Ferehawk approaches an intersection, takes a quick look around as he steps off the curb, then jets to the middle of the four-lane street. Almost simultaneously, he presses the shutter button, initiating the self-timer function, and immediately begins extending the pole to thirty-feet, before you hear the digital “click-clink” of the shutter sound.

Back to the sidewalk, and onto the next intersection.

“One of the things that I love about Los Angeles streets are all of the marks actually on the surface of the streets,” says Ferehawk. “There's this crazy history of marks from the different utility people. Some of them cut and dig parts of the street up, repave, then repaint. There's an intersection down here where they've painted three arrows in one of the lanes. They've tried to paint them all in the same spot, but they’re all just off a bit.”

Remnants from previously painted lane dividers, crosswalk lines, and turning lanes make up a mosaic of markings against varying shades of black asphalt and cement that allude to the street’s latest glow-up. They are a topographical archive of the street’s narrative that goes unnoticed by most, but that has become central to one of Ferehawk’s series of paintings, Along Pico. Using the reference images he captures on his early morning missions in the empty intersections of Pico, Ferehawk renders crisp lines that curve, connect and abruptly end to form intricate compositions and layered surfaces in a Devencorn-borrowed palette of blues, greens, yellows, and orange. Through subtle shifts of color hue, each painting evokes a sense of calm and contemplation about a scene that typically plays host to a myriad of madness.

“This series is totally a nod back to my roots in architecture, my love of architecture, and my love of LA and what makes it unique,” says Ferehawk.

Ferehawk is a spawn of the Sacramento suburbs, but has been an Angeleno for thirty years. After receiving his Masters from the Yale School of Architecture, he moved to Los Angeles, a city whose difficult and sometimes frustrating urban landscape was its biggest draw.

“Los Angeles is complicated and difficult to understand, and that’s why I fell in love with it,” Ferehawk says. “It’s a city you can’t grasp immediately.”

After realizing architecture didn’t suit him, Ferehawk started working in an industry that no longer exists in Los Angeles – building models and maquettes for the film industry. He worked in a number of shops before moving into costume design, then served as an Art Director for the big studios – Universal, DreamWorks, Walt Disney Imagineering – and eventually worked with a creative partner producing documentary films on architecture-related subjects for a number of years.

“It was full-on commercial art,” Ferehawk says. “Everyone was incredibly talented. It was an amazing and really inspiring time to work with people who were still working with their hands and with physical material in a different way than they are today.”

“It was full-on commercial art,”

Over the course of his career, Ferehawk has worked in a multitude of creative mediums, but up until a few years ago had never picked up a paint brush. His architecture years had been filled with drawing and drafting, but painting posed an entirely new beast to wrangle.

“I really consider myself an emerging painter,” says Ferehawk. “I'm experienced in other things, but painting is not one of them. I fell in love with it because it's something I can do somewhat independently. Having worked with creative teams for a really long time, painting was just a really nice break.”

Ferehawk is teaching himself as he goes. He’s only begun to scratch the surface of the medium’s deep technical and stylistic history, but has embraced the conceptual ideas that have randomly struck him in this new creative practice.

“I really consider myself an emerging painter,”

“Besides my affinity for all the things that make LA complicated and difficult, one way the city continues to contribute to my creativity is that it’s very unrestricted here,” he says. “You have space to explore ideas and ways of doing things and the freedom of not having to feel like you need to fall in line with a particular kind of style.”

It’s been the perfect creative environment for Ferehawk to explore his most recent series Airplants, where robust pot-bellied men in plaid boxers are painted floating above quintessential tract home style roofs. They’re an unexpected exploration of the average male figure today - the man you would have to shuffle past in the aisle at the grocery store, or the stoic man sitting in the hot tub all by himself on vacation. There’s an emphasis on the fleshy, surface area that’s suspended in the rich blue sky and each man’s presence interrupts the narrative of the suburban ideal.

“I’ve become fascinated with the sense of detachment that comes when you see a figure floating,” says Ferehawk. “Are these bodies escaping the gravity of conformity, or are they tethered to it? Are they floating above it or falling back into it?”

Airplants and Along Pico, couldn’t be more different. However the visual and conceptual dichotomy of these two series serve as a perfect portrait of Ferehawk’s current creative flow – that of an unabashed, life-long artist, floating (or perhaps falling) into his next creative stroke of genius.