Though rarely recognized for it, William Saroyan completed numerous gestural paintings and watercolors throughout his life that vacillated between playful and serious, minimal and complex, ordered and chaotic.

Born in Fresno, California to Armenian immigrant parents, Saroyan would go on to become one of the top writers of the mid-twentieth century, producing screenplays, novels, and short stories. He was also a visual artist of drawings and watercolors, but he never sold nor exhibited his works and never really identified as an “artist”. His abstract work was influenced by Chinese brush drawing, Jackson Pollock, and the calligraphic work of Mark Tobey. He was criticized for sentimentality — freedom, brotherly love, and universal benevolence were for him basic values - but his idealism was considered out of step with the times.