La Crescenta artist works toward mastering the details

Everything William Woeger knows about art he’s learned painstakingly, one line and brush stroke at a time.

From the time he was 4 years old, when he saw older kids in day care working on drawings and wanted in on the action, Woeger, now 30, has been perfecting his craft with a singular devotion.

“I wanted to learn how to draw what I saw more accurately, more lifelike,” he recalls. “It was an obsession, something I had to do.”

He studied the techniques of comic book and graffiti artists, old sailor tattoos and the works of Picasso and Michelangelo. He devoured books on perspective and form, learning how to reproduce the light and essence of human faces, the fluff of cats and muscularity of equines.

The success so far of Woeger’s decades-long autodidactic pursuit of capturing the spirit of life is currently on display in an exhibit at Penelope’s Café Books & Gallery in La Cañada through October.

The eclectic show of about 20 watercolors and drawings, along with several sketches cut from Woeger’s own books, demonstrates the La Crescenta artist’s nimble mastery of pen and brush. But it also communicates to viewers what they’re seeing — the art and the man — is a work in progress, something likely to become even richer with time.

Born in Anaheim in 1984, Woeger copied Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons as a child and often got in trouble at school for drawing instead of paying attention in class. His mother, a nurse, moved him and his sisters across the country, first to Georgia, then Tennessee, then Ohio.

In Cincinnati, a teenage Woeger developed a fascination with graffiti artist Mode 2, known for creating sweeping urban street scenes. He admired the artist’s ability to tell a story about life as he saw it.

“It was very intriguing to me, and I wanted to be able to do that,” he remembers.

Woeger continued learning to draw and paint, stacking up art books he’d bought with his savings. But with no formal life plan, he joined the Army at 20. He served as an all-wheel vehicle mechanic for five years and was deployed to Korea and then to Afghanistan in 2008, hardly ever drawing due to what he described as a complete lack of patience.

“The drive wasn’t there,” he says. “I didn’t know what to draw, either. It was frustrating.”

Woeger stayed near Fort Hood after the military, obtaining an apprenticeship in Killeen, TX, under a local tattoo artist. He worked at a few parlors over the next three years and developed an appreciation for the aesthetic of old school sailor-style and Japanese tattoos.

Still, he found the work didn’t approximate a true art career. That and other personal dissatisfactions led him to move to La Crescenta, where his father lived. Today, he makes a living doing commissions and selling pieces here and there.

A regular visitor to the La Crescenta Library, where he frequently works on drawings, Woeger came to know Library Manager Marta Wiggins. She would offer him the venue as the location for his first show.

“Gradually, I got to know him and when I realized how talented he was, I asked if he ever thought of exhibiting his work,” Wiggins says, calling the March 7 show that followed a success. “For me, this is the best part of my job.”

Wiggins commissioned at least one work from the local artist, a lush watercolor rendering of her Siamese cats, Misha and Sasha. She also referred Woeger to Larry Moss, the owner of Penelope’s Café.

A studied artist who also owns an architectural landscape firm, Moss recognized a quality in the young artist’s work not typically seen among modern artists.

“He’s a talented guy,” the café owner says. “He’s a pretty good comical artist, and his line drawing is really good. The special part is his recognition of life forms and applying them in an artistic manner — that is something special, because not everyone can do that.”

Despite his accomplishment at capturing forms, Woeger admits there’s more to learn.

“I still want there to be something more in the subject, something that reaches out to somebody,” he says. “Many artists say they want there to be a spirit in there — I guess that’s what I’m looking for.”