Louise Williams retrospective
statement by the artist
"Beauty Disguised"
mixed media by Louise WilliamsBeauty’s many faces have fascinated me, but the fragile truth I’ve found in representing the human form and numinous spirit within have been the centerpiece of my work as an artist. There I’ve found a gentle hope and connection to the sacred. The making of images is an act of love and protection. If there is magic in creation it is in the details. In the slow work of seeing and thinking, making mark after mark, and yes, even in erasing is a process that composes and allows perception of a bigger picture. Evolution is like an extremely slow artist with a huge piece of paper, who tries new shapes and colors, then builds on the ones that no longer work compositionally. The evolution of my images includes winks of numinous presence, lusty eyefuls, keening with sorrow.
I have always been drawn to the human face and form as the imagery that most deeply allows me to explore myself, others, society, and transcendent meaning. The nonlinearity of painting and drawing holds best some of what I long to express. Early on my work was filled with a range of emotions from the explosive to delicate. This emotional content demanded intentional distortion of the form and color of bodies. In the late seventies watercolor was the evocative medium for "Floating bodies" based on dream states, sensuous and meditative expressions of the body. The figure to ground relationship was one of the body filling a filmy space.
While at graduate school in the early 1980’s I began to explore images of night such as dreams, romantic and parental love. These "Night Dramas" were two distinct bodies of work. The largest were expressionistic images of figures in beds on 5 x 9’ paper executed in charcoal with pastel. These drawings portrayed profound experiences that usually occur on beds: birth, sex, reading to a child, sickness, dreaming, death. The second series was executed in vibrantly colored pastels on 30 x 40" black paper. These images were of the more public night dramas occurring at parties and lounges. As I was also painting in oils, one huge painting called "Cul de Sac" ( 8 x 16’) was an attempt to, in one painting, to "summarize" everything I wanted to express. Not surprisingly, a kernel of expressive need led to more paintings and drawings.
One constant source of imagery throughout my career has been the mother-child relationship. At times most of my work has drawn on this imagery. Years ago, after viewing my slides an interviewer asked, "How many children do you have?" My paintings and drawings of family relationships, particularly the mother-child relationship were informed by historical Christian images of the holy family. In a more "modern" interpretation, I sought the spiritual in divergent family forms. Thus, the iconography was of airplanes not angels( although angels in retribution continue to fly into my imagery), electric current instead of a halo, TV’s, stuffed toys, pajamas with feet, blue herons in the background.
Just as the empathetic cries of an infant echo those of another child who has fallen, my work has sometimes been a reciprocal scream: a direct response to tragedies personal and planetary. In November of 1986 my friend Sara was raped and murdered. March 1987, during an artist’s residency at the Ucross Foundation, I began a series of pastels about grief and her death. One morning walking, I found a dead cow in a ditch, and this image found its way into many pieces of art. By 1988 I had begun work on an installation "Cut Flowers" responding to the Green River Killings. The centerpiece of this installation was a series charcoal drawings of the same number of women as there were victims. Each woman was drawn from an image snipped out the paper: these women were not the raped and murdered, but victims of the collateral damage in fear and limited movement that such violence inflicts on all women.
In the mid 1990’s I began work that was not so much a scream as an echo. The Africa Series looked at the common ground-the peaceable kingdom—in which love prevails to join us through our differences and suffering. A month in Egypt gave a bit of first hand experience, and a series pastels resulted. Then I began work on a series of mixed media works derived from news photos of appealing children, most refugees from Somalia, Rwanda and Sudan. These children were/are a kind of messenger/angel calling forth our connection to all of humanity. This work sought to express and amplify these experiences of our unity through aesthetic beauty.
With "Child/Layered Lives" in 1999 I created drawings that I hoped could reduce stigma and increase understanding of the chronically mentally ill. Charcoal drawings of children on frosted acetate overlay text on paper. In some senses the concept behind the work was similar to that in "Cut Flowers". The text tells the stories of the children who grow up to have schizophrenia or other catastrophic mental illness and others who do not. All are normal children. My son became ill with schizophrenia as a young adult.
Nearly as pervasive as images of children in my work is an interest in the creative process itself. Children are often the symbol of creation, renewal for me. The how, why and what of the creative impulse is often part of the content of my work. Ideas often come to me complete with the demand for a particular medium and size. Just as a child comes with a complete set of DNA that is molded by the nurturing of environment, my work is formed as it is executed.
These drawings, paintings and prints were chosen to represent three decades of studio work. Each was created using the periscopic vision of my life with the intention that the viewers would find in their experiences the completion of the narrative.
© 2003 by Alec Clayton