Trained as a realist painter, William Dole taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He first experimented with collage during a sabbatical in Florence, Italy, where he acquired a leather-bound journal full of book pages, letters, maps, and more. His early collages referenced the Italian landscape, but after his return to the United States around 1958 his compositions became increasingly abstract. By cutting out bits of typography, details from scientific diagrams and areas of printed color, from discarded magazines, Dole created a stock of raw material. These he used to assemble his lyrically delicate compositions.
