Bill deGroot

Bill deGroot was born and raised in the Netherlands. While living in Europe, he earned himself a reputation as a photographer early on in his career.  He received an education as a Maitre d’hotel in a fine restaurant in Holland and later studied architecture and building technology. Today he still works in all three fields and operates a chocolaterie and The Truffle Shop in Nevada City, reputed to be one of the finest in the world.

DeGroot is known for his creative photography, surrealist compositions, landscapes and montages, on the one hand, and his documentary photography on the other. “I wait for the right moment. That’s one of the most important aspects of my work. By waiting for the right moment, I can take an ordinary situation and make the extraordinary stand out in it.”

In addition to his culinary and photographic work, deGroot has created a number of “ready-mades,” assemblages that remind one of the early work of Kurt Schwitters and of some pieces of Marcel Duchamp. The pieces deGroot uses for his assemblages have an innate quality that demands for them to be part of a piece of art. When it comes to collage the artist becomes a collector; his work is to find the object, discern it from other unusable ones, and place the found objects in a space that shows the internal values of the piece.