Emyr Williams

My work develops primarily around the relationship between drawing and painting (an issue directly addressed in recent digital works - available as giclee prints). I make sculpture periodically, too. The overwhelming majority of works in this site are abstract - especially in intent, rather than having been abstracted from any feeling, place, space, moment, motif, person or object. 

A painter has four key factors to control: hue, tonality, saturation and opacity , and the surface conditions the expressiveness of each of these four. I do not look further than these facts and have no interest in utilising my paintings for extrinsic “issues”. In all my work, the surface is crucial and I employ various techniques to maximise the relationship between the colour and its facture. I enjoy acrylic paint for its versatility and how it affords me the opportunities to push the paint into more exciting visual states. All my energies are focused on maximising my colour and handling: nothing is left to chance; when an instance of paint is on the surface and I see its role in the whole, I question its qualities - would they need reworking, improving somehow? The reworking offers new possibilities as well as consolidations of existing ones. I identity the making of the work as drawing and everything seen as a result of this making as the colour: ‘drawing’ is making, ‘colour’ is seeing.  

Each section is organised by years and features a representative series of works from that period. There are numerous supplementary works which, although have other merits, are not included in these selections. Titles are simply names which can connect in, sometimes, often oblique or personally associative, ways and are not intended to imply any guiding narrative. The paintings must speak for themselves and any extra information from me would only get in the way.