Bill Witherspoon is a life-long visual artist, serial entrepreneur, and lover of sky. In his six decades, living on and off in the High Steppe desert in southeastern Oregon, he has painted watercolor skies, practiced ancient art as spiritual discipline, and weathered that pristine geological expanse.

As an artist, over the last four decades, Bill has mounted 40 one-man exhibitions of paintings, prints, and sculptures (1968 – 2020), in addition to desert public art projects. He is also the founder and Creative Director of The Sky Factory, a fine arts, digital technology, and cognitive science studio that designs and manufactures the world’s only research-verified virtual skylights—Luminous SkyCeilings and Luminous Virtual Windows.

His first book, Enter Space—Stories from the High Desert, lays witness to a life surrounded by that rare, unsummoned vastness; one that those of us steeped in the ceaseless churn of urban life can now imagine living through the faithful record of the artist’s experience.

Book: Enter Space: Stories from the High Desert

Sri Yantra: The Oregon Desert Mystery FULL MOVIE

Transcript and Summary of this interview

Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group

Interview recorded September 3, 2023.

YouTube Video Chapters:

00:00:00 - Introduction and Background of Bill Witherspoon

00:04:49 - A Life of Adventure and Silence

00:09:25 - Being Swept Away by the Waterfall

00:12:52 - A Life-Threatening Water Rescue

00:16:34 - The Near-Drowning Experience That Changed My Life

00:21:02 - The Transcendent Experience of Meditation

00:24:35 - Climbing the Radio Tower and Facing Danger at Sea

00:29:01 - Seeing More Deeply

00:32:33 - Healing the Eye of the Heart

00:36:42 - The Burning Shell

00:40:15 - Learning and Growth through Perseverance

00:43:50 - The Sri Yantra: An Instance of a Law of Nature

00:48:10 - The Bindu

00:52:38 - The New Kind of Seeing

00:57:00 - The Essence of Memory and Love

01:01:06 - A Slideshow of Photographic Events in the Wilderness

01:05:39 - Living in Harmony with Rattlesnakes

01:08:46 - Witnessing Violence and the Impact

01:12:55 - Encounters with Rattlesnakes

01:16:22 - The Strange Book and its Contents

01:20:36 - The Presence of Divine Intelligence

01:24:30 - Accessing Deeper Levels of Consciousness through Meditation

01:32:35 - The Horrors of Being on Death Row

01:35:35 - The Influence of Human Presence

01:40:37 - "Goodbye," when we went looking for wild horses

01:44:58 - Reflections on an Interesting Life

01:49:33 - Going Deeper in Consciousness

01:53:02 - Building a Beautiful Corporation

01:56:56 - The Skill of Self-Reflection

02:00:18 - Gratitude and Farewell