William Acheff

William Acheff was born in Anchorage, Alaska, on January 28, 1947. Until age five, he lived in the remote village of two hundred residents where his mother was born to an Athabascan mother and a Dutch-Scottish father, who came to Alaska in 1898 at the onset of the Alaskan gold rush.

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After three years of art classes in high school, Acheff ignored the advice of his high school art teacher and didn’t go on to art college. Instead, he went to barber college in San Francisco, thinking he would eventually open up a very exclusive barbershop. He met Roberto Lupetti in a barbershop, and following a casual conversation about art, Lupetti invited him to his drawing class. After seeing only one drawing, Lupetti felt Acheff was ready to tackle painting. Lupetti later exclaimed to his wife, “He’s got it!”

In 1969, Acheff began a six-month-long, five-day-a-week, six-hour-a-day immersion in painting with this Italian master, and what started as a hobby was transformed into a lifetime passion and career. He continued to see Lupetti over the next three years for criticism and words of wisdom.

Acheff moved to Taos, New Mexico, in 1973, where Native Americans have since provided him with many subjects, including blankets, pottery, drums, and other cultural objects. In 1989 and 2004, he received the Prix de West Purchase Award for Flapjacks. His work was included in Covering the West, a traveling exhibition in conjunction with Southwest Art magazine’s 25th-anniversary edition.

Acheff’s style is suggestive of Dutch still-life painters from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, particularly the Harnett trompe l’oeil school. In 1998, Acheff’s oil painting Spirits, Symbols, and Ceremonies won the Masters of the American West Award, given in recognition of the work acquired for the Autry National Center of the American West’s permanent collection.

William Acheff is represented by Settlers West Galleries Inc., Tucson, Arizona.