BILLY KING BELIEVES that borders define attention.
A longtime Seattle artist and muralist, King, 77, is best known for large-scale works in Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square — vibrant, colorful panels crowded with vendors, hustlers, passersby and dreamers. He also paints, sketches and makes prints, finding recurring cosmic and human patterns in any medium.
On a recent weekday afternoon, hunting down King’s murals is an adventure in occasional trespass. Some adorn well-traveled paths. Others are tucked into apartment foyers or half-forgotten corridors. At least one, King says, has simply disappeared. Whenever he explores downtown, he brings along food for “the first homeless guy we see.”
Sure enough, outside a downtown doorway, King hands a small bag of snacks to a ragged man holding a cardboard sign. After a companionable howdy-do, King offers design advice he learned decades ago while working at Sean’s Produce in the Market.
“Have you got a magic marker?” he asks the man. “Draw a black border around the edge of your sign. That border means people have to look at it. If you leave the edges open, it’s optional.”
Born in Coos Bay, Ore., King grew up in Spokane before arriving in Seattle in 1966 to study art at the University of Washington. Like many artist peers, he never graduated — “a badge of honor,” he calls it — and worked a succession of jobs: railroad yard checker, dishwasher, bartender and Market vendor. Art, however, remained the through line.
Hustle and timing eventually landed King in a 1974 Smithsonian exhibition surveying Pacific Northwest art, a turn that “confounded and irritated” local critics because King was, in his words, “a nobody.”
Early on, he learned that declaring oneself an artist mattered as much as credentials, a lesson reinforced when, in 1977, King received his first major mural commission — for the Fairmont Hotel Apartments on the First Avenue side of the Market.
Inspired by a classic, early 20th-century photo of Market farmers unloading wagons, he reinterpreted the scene. “When you make art, you have 10,000 elements,” he says. “The artist’s job is to winnow that down, first to 1,000, then maybe 100. Out of that, you paint the most important 30.”
Such distillation defines King’s best-known works. For his Market and Pioneer Square murals, he has painted primarily from memory. The result isn’t nostalgia. It’s taxonomy — a living catalog of urban roles still very much with us.
On a return visit to the Market, we encounter the same homeless man. His cardboard sign now includes a neatly drawn black border. King notices immediately and gives a thumbs-up. Attention, after all, begins at the edges.
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