William Rand was born in 1953 and grew up in Freeport Maine; he was tutored in art from a very early age.
In 1970 Rand studied Pre-Raphaelite painting in England as a teenager at Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities before dropping out of the University of Maine in Orono to study at the Portland School of Art, beginning in 1975 and graduating in 1978 with a degree having successfully studied human anatomy and with a BFA in painting. (In 1976, Rand attended the Aspen International Design Conference on a Milton Glaser Scholarship.) 

Working in studios on the coast of Maine and in New York through the eighties and nineties, the William Rand exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art in 1993 was the artist’s first solo show in Maine. (Colby has purchased several works for the museum’s permanent collection.) In New York, Rand exhibited at 56 Bleecker Gallery, Tatistcheff Gallery, and Thread Waxing Space, among many others.

In New York Rand collaborated and published with Warhol Factory poets Rene Ricard (Publishing Ricard in catalogues both in New York and at Colby) and Taylor Mead.

The New York Public Library Print Dept. owns the large five” Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth 1960-1990” silk screens (ed. 14) in which Rand illustrated Beat poems written by Taylor Mead in 1960, as does the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland Maine, (gift of collectors Charles Curkin and the Countess Christina Wachtmeister).

Moving to Europe in 1996, Rand began working with French art dealer Bruno Reymond on the island of Ibiza, (playground of the international jet set) where the artist continues to work to this day. Opening a studio in Madrid in 1997, the artist became well known there for his Ava Gardner series of paintings (4) collaborating with New York art critic Richard Milazzo who wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition in Madrid in 2002.

Today, William Rand paints in a studio in Torrevieja on the Spanish Mediterranean, travelling between Spain, New York and Maine where he is represented by Aucocisco Galleries. William Rand is a member of  ARS in New York.

"The large figurative monochromatic paintings of William Rand are characteristically enigmatic" (*1) if not moody, quoting eighteenth century art (2) and reflecting our times using the confrontational vocabulary of violence, mass media and photojournalism(3).

1. Hugh Gourley, Director Colby College Museum of Art 1993

2. The New Yorker, June 26 1989

3. The Maine Times, Sept. 10 1993 by Haines Sprunt Tate

4. Artforum, September 2002 page 66