William Lawrence Hawkins was a self-taught artist whose works bear his full name, birth place, and birthdate in block letters across the bottom, despite his being nearly illiterate. His paintings are bold and colorful, and they depict a variety of subjects ranging from animals and buildings to religious, historical, and contemporary events. Hawkins was proud that he never received an art education, stating that he “was born an artist.”
Hawkins was born in Union City, Kentucky, less than twenty miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s also where Big Bone Lick State Park is located, known for the remains of numerous large animal species, including mastodons and mammoths found there. The site was known as early as the eighteenth century by such notables as Thomas Jefferson and Merriweather Lewis. Throughout his career, dinosaurs and other large, exotic creatures were a favorite topic for Hawkins, as were the animals on the farm where he grew up. As a child, he learned to draw by copying pictures from calendars, advertisements, and horse auction posters.
When he was twenty-one, Hawkins moved to Columbus, Ohio. Shortly afterward, in 1918, he was drafted into the United States Army and was attached to the “Buffalo Division,” a Black unit of the 317th Regiment Engineers. The unit was responsible for building and repairing roads and railroad tracks for the deadly Meuse-Argonne offensive that took place in northern France. Upon his discharge in 1919, Hawkins found himself working myriad odd jobs, two of which were truck driving and overseeing a small brothel. This would lead him to marriage twice and supposedly resulted in twenty children.
By the 1930s, Hawkins was making art, but he didn’t work seriously as an artist until he began producing his signature pieces in the 1970s. At first he used discarded materials: cardboard or lumber from construction sites and paint thrown away by hardware stores. He would rifle through his collection of newspapers, magazines, and other ephemera, which he kept in a suitcase, and say, “give me a gift,” seeking inspiration for his next project. He often painted with a stick and a single brush, pouring paint straight out of a can. Hawkins never exhibited his work until age 87, when a friend submitted it in the 1982 Ohio State Fair, where it won first prize. As he garnered recognition he could afford masonite, which he claimed he preferred because it didn’t “suck up the paint.” Occasionally he added various collage elements and sometimes even made his work three-dimensional. In a video interview he declared: “I am happy all of the time. I don’t live for myself. I live to make people happy.”