Bay area artist Bill Selden holds an acrylic-and-oil painting titled “Naptime �” Midday Surf” in his Coos Bay home. Though he has painted a vast array of subjects in a variety of styles, the artist favors seascapes that often feature seabirds and rim lighting.-World Photo by Alex Powers

COOS BAY — For Coos Bay artist Bill Selden, museum recognition was a little slow coming. But when it came, it came in abundance.

In the Coos Art Museum’s 15th-annual Maritime Art Exhibit, Selden accomplished something special: Two of his three paintings were among the top four winners in the exhibit, and the third one was picked as an entry of merit.

Selden, 62, has been a successful artist since long before he moved to the Bay Area five years ago. He received entries of merit in both of the previous Maritime shows he’s entered, but this is his first time winning an award at a museum.

“I wondered why I never won anything before,” Selden said Tuesday at his home near Radar Hiall. “I’m very happy to finally have a couple of pieces they liked well enough to acknowledge. It’s kind of like an actress who waits tables — you just want to be discovered. I just wish it hadn’t taken 40 years.”

Coos Art Museum director Steven Broocks said life in the art world often goes that way.

“There are times in your life when you’re going along doing the same thing you’ve always been doing, and all of a sudden you get all sorts of recognition for it,” Broocks said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to when it happens.”

Selden, who grew up in Orange County, Calif., began his art career at Disneyland, where he worked as a quick-sketch portrait artist during summers while in high school, using his earnings to put himself through art college. He then worked as a commercial portrait artist in seven states over 20 years, before moving to Oregon almost 20 years ago, when he shifted to marine art.

“I’d been painting portraits for probably 25 years,” Selden said. “I decided I didn’t want to paint people’s heads anymore, so seascapes are what I decided to do.”

His penchant for moving frequently continued after air quality lured him to Oregon, taking him to six cities on the Oregon Coast: Nehalem, Florence, Newport, Yachats, Florence again, North Bend and finally Coos Bay.

Though he occasionally took other jobs, Selden said for most of his life he’s been able to support himself — always single, no children — with art, selling regularly. He is represented by Gallery 280 in North Bend, Tsunami Gallery in Gardiner and Earthworks in Yachats. At one time he was producing six or seven paintings a month, but Selden now considers himself retired, doing maybe that much in a year. His paintings in the museum exhibit are valued as high as $6,500.

During his time as a portrait artist, Selden became known for celebrity portraits, some of which are on display at Gallery 280.

Selden paints in a realistic style, working from images from photographs — often a composite of several, because he rarely gets a perfect picture — and copying them as well as he can.

“I try, but my hands are not that good,” he said. “Which I guess is fine, because it looks more arty that way.”

It takes a lot of control to paint boats. Selden said he prefers to paint simpler seascapes and shorebirds, painting the more challenging boats exclusively for the Maritime show.

“People don’t always know what a seascape looks like, and you can fudge it a little bit,” he said. “But they sure know what a boat looks like and what rigging looks like. And if it’s not painted right, why bother?”

Selden’s process involves painting a scene in acrylic first, then repainting the entire canvas in oil, continually refining it — often working on multiple paintings at a time because oil paintings must sit several days to dry each time the artist retouches them.

While a lot of that work for his Maritime show paintings goes into getting the details of the boats right, it’s Selden’s handling of the colorful ways light hits water that makes his paintings so dazzling.

“He’s a very good colorist,” said Ned Mueller, the show’s featured artist who chose Selden for an entry of merit, adding compliments on Selden’s knowledge of how light and objects reflect on water.

“He’s just a master artist that has mastered all the principles and techniques of good painting.”