Childhood doodling on the backs of invoices in his father’s Joliet store has evolved into the way Bill Bartelt pays the bills.
Bartelt’s muse expresses itself in everything from painting scenic watercolors to designing sets for plays to creating logos for television news shows.
“I always knew I wanted to be some kind of artist. I just thought maybe a political cartoonist. It was a big interest of mine,” the 44-year-old artist said from his second-floor apartment on Chicago’s North Side.
As a child, Bartelt can remember attempting to draw trains on the back of invoices and bills from his father’s store in downtown Joliet.
“There was always plenty of paper,” he said of his father’s tractor store at 155 N. Joliet St. “For the most part, my childhood was pretty typical of life in a small town in the 1950s. It was lots of fun. One of my first memories is picking up a pencil and trying to draw a train because I was fascinated with trains. I would draw the cars and engine and go to my father to put the wheels on. My father gave me my first actual training and lessons.”
His father died 23 years ago, but his mother, Fran, still lives in Joliet. She said: “He was always interested in art work. He would spend a lot of time doing delicate-type bridge designs . . . like ironwork.”
At St. Raymond’s grade school and Joliet Catholic High School, he would draw caricatures of his classmates, and friends would sit and watch. After graduating from Lewis University in Romeoville, he started his career in the advertising department of Joliet’s Kemlite, illustrating and designing advertising for the company’s plastic construction materials under the direction of Jack Sergeant.
“(Sergeant) was really the one who got me going professionally,” Bartelt said. “He encouraged me.”
From his retirement home near Kentucky Lake in Kentucky, Sergeant reminisced about Bartelt.
“I was the marketing communication director for Kemlite, and Bill was one of my designers,” he said. “I was training him, trying to steer him into the direction where he could critique his own work. I told him not to be satisfied with the first thing you design. Try something different. It worked for him.”
Sergeant, who retired from Kemlite after 30 years in September 1992, found a ready pupil in Bartelt.
“Bill wasn’t afraid to start anew,” he said. “He’s a great guy and tremendous talent.”
Bartelt left Kemlite to attend graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he studied theater production.
“After graduation I went to New York for a season, but it was a little too intense for me,” he said. “Then I tried Hollywood for a year. I liked Hollywood and I was real busy. But the industry dried up for about six months.”
A strike in the early ’80s left Bartelt out of work on the West Coast. A job offer from the Goodman Theatre drew him back to Chicago.
“I was tired of moving around. I realized I would do just as well here,” he said. “Chicago is like a little New York and Hollywood right here in the Midwest.”
Though the cliche speaks of struggling artists, Bartelt has managed to stay busy.
“I’ve never missed a meal,” he said. “I’ve tried to stay as diverse as possible. Just doing one thing is not enough to make a living with. You just need to be resourceful and diversified and take advantage of opportunities.”
That diversification manifests itself in some of his many sidelines. They include painting murals and faux marble for residential and commercial customers and teaching theater at College of St. Francis in Joliet, most recently in fall 1992.
And that’s not all. Bartelt also has served as scenic artist on “The Babe” with John Goodman and as lead scenic artist on “The Public Eye,” starring Barbara Hershey and Joe Pesci. In that job, Bartelt said, the artist makes sure the locations match the time frame depicted in the film.
For instance, the 1940s settings of “The Public Eye” required street signs and billboards painted in keeping with that period.
“Sometimes it can be as simple as painting out the marks on the street,” Bartelt said. “I’ve spent a lot of time walking down the street with a spray gun.”
When shooting on “The Public Eye” required the lobby of the main Chicago post office to double as a federal building, Bartelt painted a wall mural to resemble a Work Projects Administration work typical of that era.
In “The Babe,” Goodman as Ruth hits a homer through the stained-glass window of a church in Boston, for which St. Vincent’s Church in Chicago stood in. Bartelt simulated St. Vincent’s stained glass in acrylic plastic, crafting three that were used for the film.
Most of Bartelt’s television work has been for WMAQ. He designed the logo for the station’s sports program, Chicago Bears Weekly, plus other logos, including the Decision ’92 used during the election.
“I’ll also occasionally art-direct a promo spot and touch up the sets to keep them looking fresh.”
At WMAQ-Ch. 5, NBC’s local station, resident art director Jack Hakman said of Bartelt: “He’s a very gifted fellow. If Bill’s available, he’s the first person I think of because of his enormous talent. Bill has a wonderful, very professional approach, and that incorporates into his consideration of other people and times things need to be completed by. He’s always, always a pleasure to deal with.”
As if that isn’t enough, Bartelt also finds time to design theater sets, most recently for Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater production of “Hospitality Suite.”
The Joliet Drama Guild gave him his start in set design, which requires conferring with the director to determine the play’s concept and the role the set should play in conveying that concept. Then, Bartelt said, he visits actual locations.
“For `Hospitality Suite,’ which was set in a modern hospitality suite in a hotel in Wichita, I visited hotels in the area and sent away for brochures from Wichita hotels,” he said. “I wanted to capture the corporate assembly line feel of being at a hotel. The atmosphere had to be attractive and comfortable, yet in a way be hostile at the same time.”
To do that, Bartelt narrowed the palette to grays and salmons, and used borrowed furniture from television studios.
“I wanted to give it that institutional drabness,” he said. “There was nothing surprising about this room.”
John Swanbeck, director of “Hospitality Suite,” said Bartelt delivered a set that was just what he was looking for.
“I found Bill’s portfolio really striking, and he had three things that I was looking for,” Swanbeck said.
Those requirements included Bartelt’s experience in working with theaters similar to Victory Gardens, his ability to work within confined space and his painting of landscapes.
“In some of his designs, Bill created the idea of confined space while still allowing room for the actors to move, which is what I was looking for,”Swanbeck said. “His designs were almost a character unto themselves, not a main character but a strong supporting character. He is a director’s dream designer.”
That set was much different from the one he designed for the August 1992 production of “Camelot” at Lewis University in Romeoville.
“Camelot was a fairy tale gothic setting, which needed to look heavy and rustic, yet maintain a mysterious quality,” Bartelt said. He has also designed sets for productions of “The Music Man” at the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet and David Mamet’s “Edmond,” which went from Chicago to Broadway, along with his sets.
“You can’t fit what I do into a category,” he said. “I do murals, television, movies and industrial work plus paintings. When the outside work gets slow, that’s when I paint. I’ve sold paintings all over the city and the suburbs. I’ve sold to businesses, restaurants and offices.”
Bartelt picked up his watercolor pastime following the lull in his career in the early ’80s. He studied watercolors at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and intends to paint long after his retirement from other pursuits.
“It’s a parallel career for me. I’ll do painting until I can’t do it anymore. I never worry about finding something to paint.”
Painting also has served as an excuse to travel. In search of subjects, he has ventured to Russia, Turkey and the American Southwest.
“I go out and get charged up,” Bartelt said. “I spend a few months after my trip painting in response to it. This adds an extra dimension to my travels.”
His travels are captured in landscapes that include scenes of Chicago, Door County in Wisconsin and lighthouses along the Great Lakes.
“I don’t rely on the show business world to keep me busy,” Bartelt said.
Hakman greatly admires Bartelt’s watercolors.
“When I started seeing his watercolors, I realized how wonderful Bill is,” he said.
Since then, he has worked with Bartelt on residential and commercial interiors.
“Bill brings the same eye and same brush to the faux work that is so popular now,” Hakman said. “He has done marbleizing for apartments and hotels in town. I cannot emphasize enough the pleasure it is to work with him.”
Like Hakman, Cherry Brown, an architectural designer with Jerome Brown Associates Ltd. in Chicago, has worked with Bartelt. Together they helped design the interior of Mars Restaurant, a Chinese eatery at 3124 N. Broadway, Chicago.
“The three young people who own the restaurant and are from Shanghai requested that the restaurant look Chinese but without using normal devices such as red lanterns,” Brown said. “Bill re-created the colors of Beijing and Xian using flesh colors, faux marble and making the columns look like antique terra cotta. It’s a difficult restaurant to describe.”
Bartelt recently completed his second project for Brown.
“I have a client with a grand piano in horrible condition. Bill is painting a Renaissance painting all over the piano. He’s fabulous,” she said. “In the bathroom of this same client’s apartment, he’s painting one wall (to look) as if you’re on a terrace with a colonnade overlooking the Mediterranean. This should open the room up considerably.”
For the most part, according to Bartelt, theater does have a season in Chicago.
“I start to get busy in late summer and around the holidays,” he said. “There’s a little lull in late winter, but for the most part it’s really unpredictable. Generally in the mid-winter, early summer and late fall I have more time to paint.”
Part of the advice he offers to those dreaming of following in his footsteps is to not be afraid of struggles.
“The struggles are good for your character.” he said. “Everybody in art has rough times. You just can’t let it discourage you. Keep abreast of your work and prepare for the lean times.”
Bartelt said he finds his work always refreshing and challenging.
“I’ve learned to live with flux. There’s an up and down flow to what I do,” he said. “I could never be one of those people to sit in the same chair at the same desk and look at the same walls for years. I think that’s what motivated me to go to graduate school, avoiding repetition.”
As with many artists, some non-artists view Bartelt as eccentric. “I don’t live like other people and I don’t keep the same hours,” he said. But he deals with it.
“I take pride in it,” he said. “I just don’t wear a smock, beret and act nutty.”
