Landscapes And Still Lifes : Michael Williams
For more than fifty years, Michael Williams has made paintings and works on paper grounded in the act of looking. His landscapes and still lifes begin with intense observation and are built slowly, through drawing and the accumulation of fine, deliberate lines. Yet these are not simply records of appearances. Williams continually tests the tension between the recognisable image and the picture’s surface: between the object described and the colour, rhythm and light through which it is remade.
After moving from London to rural Wales in the early 1970s, Williams turned away from the prevailing language of international modernism and towards the natural world. The hills and quarries of Radnorshire, the Welsh coast, the mountains of Greece and, more recently, the canals and hills near his home in Stroud have become recurring subjects. His still lifes offer a more intimate field of enquiry, bringing ordinary objects into unexpected relationships that can seem contemplative, enigmatic and quietly metaphysical.
Since 2003, Williams has worked exclusively on paper, developing an exacting visual language in which drawing and colour are closely intertwined. His works sustain a subtle tension between patient, topographical description and the fluidity of light, water and colour. The repeated marks that map the visible world also animate it, creating a continual movement between surface and space, certainty and sensation.
