Louise Williams retrospective
Review by Alec Clayton published in The Weekly Volcano, April 2003
"Beauty Disguised"
mixed media by Louise WilliamsNote: This is like the directors' cut of a movie. It is the original version before I had to cut it down to 650 words for publication.
Louise Williams’ retrospective exhibition at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts is a show that really should be seen, since this exhibition will probably provide our only opportunity to see representative samples of works from every phase of this painter who has been a fixture on the South Sound art scene for 30 years.
Williams’ paintings have always been figurative, and they have always told stories, although the stories have never been explicit. Her earliest works were dark, strange, foreboding, and often highly erotic. As she has grown older, raised children and grandchildren, and bravely battled cancer, her paintings have become lighter, more joyful, more infused with love of humanity in general and family in particular.
The earliest works consist of a group of large watercolors of figures that are opulent and distorted as if seen through water or reflected in a warped mirror. Some of them have a sexual predator look about them. But a lot of people will not see that, because Williams has a way of disguising some of her more disturbing and more sexual images. For instance, one pastel from the ‘80s is of a nude nymph hugging a tree. None of the usual erogenous parts of her body are exposed; yet the fullness of the body, the radiance of the flesh tones and the manner in which she wraps her legs around that tree is as blatantly sexual as art can be.
Another group of early works are nightlife scenes in pastel on black paper, which have an amazing luminosity created by energetic marks in light colors layered over darker areas, so that the pastel marks become as brilliant as skyrocket bursts. A similar technique is used in one pastel of a family in a swimming pool that is drawn on two panels that are hinged together to create a T shape. This particular painting has legs contorted into positions that are almost anatomically impossible, and other body parts similarly distorted by the wave action of the water. Similarly surrealistic distortions show up in other pictures of swimmers and in one particularly disturbing painting of a wedding scene in which a baby sits on the groom’s head with legs blanketing his face.
And speaking of disturbing imagery, there is a whole series of paintings Williams did of road kill cattle combined with big-limbed women, and the series of black and white drawings of victims of the Green River killer. She has looked at the underbelly of life and drawn it with brutal honesty. But she has also looked with eyes of love at children and family. A large portion of her drawings and paintings over the past eight years has been based on her granddaughter. Motherhood, travel to other countries, items read in the newspaper, and most of all the mundane activities of life have become her predominant subject over the past few years. Often the exotic and the mundane become intertwined in her paintings. Pictures based on a trip to Egypt, a series of paintings on African subjects, fantasy images of bird boys, and pictures of her granddaughter at play all have the same universal appeal; all are part of a close knit human family.
"Seeds Germinate in Darkness" is a portrait of a child with an open chest, seeds growing in a seedpod where the heart should be—reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s bleeding heart paintings, but not quite so shocking. The child looks Asian but could be anyone’s child. Williams describes it as "a portrait of a state of being" and says of the child, "He’s a little trouble maker. He’s not going to totally toe the line." You can see that in this child’s face. He’s an impish little fellow whom anyone could fall in love with, but you know if you do that he’s liable to break your heart.
Another universal theme in Williams’ paintings is the image of two children touching each other’s cheeks. They are usually African children, and they have show up in a number of her paintings and drawings with African themes. They were based on a picture she saw in the newspaper of war refugees in Africa who were reunited after a long separation. In "Unconsious Contact" (pastel on black paper), the children emerge from darkness at the bottom. High overhead floats another of the imaginary creatures that inhabit many of her fantasy pictures, a bird boy. She says the bird boys are "messengers or angels that remind us of our interconnectedness."
Her more recent work has generally been smaller in scale than earlier works, which she attributes to an accommodation to the cancer she has lived with since February 2000. It also tends to be more playful and less concerned with the big themes of her earlier works, although she does concede that some of the larger of the new works "explore the transcendent nature of our relationships with nature and each other." Many of the newer works are portraits of family members, such as "Beauty Disguised," a portrait of her granddaughter in a parade, wearing a bunny mask and pushing a scooter. The figures are simplified and painted with little shading, giving the picture the look of a storybook illustration. All of the energy is centered in the scratchy marks on the pavement and the wonderful cast shadows.
Fantasy elements and the storybook look permeate her most recent works.
"These new paintings have evolved from pastel and acrylic paintings of children in recent exhibits at Childhood’s End (a gallery in Olympia, Washington)." Williams wrote in a statement for her retrospective. "The evolution has been to more complex imagery that includes animals, adults and more natural forms ... layered with translucent glazes of color to create mysterious and symbolic light within the paintings."
Interestingly, I see more maturation than evolution, since there was a "mysterious and symbolic light" even her earliest work.
More about Louise: Read the artist's statement she wrote for her retrospective (opens in a new window).
© 2003 by Alec Clayton