After a heavy month of drawing - mainly from other art that has caught my attention - I started my year very early this morning. I spend the first hour of a studio session making more drawings; improvised works, usually. I made a fresh start on an existing painting by painting out and reworking the surface to get a foothold for the next session. I also made several revisions to an existing painting (the home page image “Back and First”) which has been nagging at me for over a month now. I purposely avoided touching it, though, preferring to put miles on the clock with my pencil drawings first. This felt like creating a pressure which the paint session was able to release. I have found these pencil drawings an ideal way to get me focused in a much more intense way to the studio work.
Problems of painting
Most painting seems to use the painting as vehicle for other issues: socio-political on the general level and symbolic narratives on the personal. There is often a hackneyed painterliness which is used to signify authenticity or a deliberate nihilism to embody edginess.
Read MoreONLINE EXHIBITION
I have 4 recent paintings, which have all been made since the lockdown, being shown in an online exhibition organised by The Cut Gallery Halesworth:
http://newcut.org/colour-exhibition/emyr-williams
statement below:
My work has always been about making paintings in response to the potential for colour to make light and space. These particular works have evolved as a result of a continual almost restless questioning about the way I put a painting together. The use of line, for instance, has become more urgent of late: line not as contour but as a force akin to an area or even a simple instance of paint. Everything in my paintings is there for a reason. I am at pains to avoid relying on chance. I will rework a painting at any point. I do not rework to accumulate more “effects” but to get to the essentials and to hone those, magnifying their realities and maximising their potential for conveying my feelings about colour. Colour can disrupt and cause mayhem in a work. I relish such conflicts and actively provoke them at times to challenge myself to resolve them into a coherent statement. I could go on and on, but unless the paintings walk the talk, it’s a fruitless exercise. I hope people enjoy their optimism.
Emyr Williams : Interview with the Charlotte Tilbury brand (from 2019)
Why are you particularly drawn to colour as an area of expertise?
Genetically speaking, I think I inherited a sense of colour from my mother who was a talented hairdresser with an amazing feel for colour. It was the late sixties and she had different colour hair every other week. There were unusual colour combinations around me at home too. I grew up in the old industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales a mile from the Beacons National Park. In my early days as an art student I used to paint the landscape, both urban and rural, both of which were very dramatic - a connection with the home I’d left, I suppose. Very slowly the subject lost interest for me and the actual colour began to take over as autonomous content…
Read MoreTexture in the lockdown
We walked over a small bridge hearing a brook moving beneath, the babbling of my kids chattering in the near distance behind me, the small birds flitting and chirping, the crackle of the dry grasses and twigs we were walking over, then the gusting almost haunting sounds of the wind. All these sound textures create our sense of space.
Read MoreA QUICK REFLECTION ON SCALE
…a “physical” colour has a perceptual amount of expressiveness/ impact; this amount is not, though, proportionate to its actual size.
Read MoreNEW INK DRAWINGS
I am working on canvas with a rich shellac based Indian ink. The canvas is prepared with a ground coating, which is a plaster-like surface of marble dust medium. This accepts the stain of the ink more readily than the cotton weave itself would (I use a buff canvas colour which generates a warmth in the black ink): making these drawings feels akin to the art of fresco painting: I tend not to overwork them but if I do need to make alterations, I “re-plaster” the paint on with a skin of the ground colour and then I can redraw the adjusted passage back on top - staining the new ink back in - similar to the modus operandi of a fresco.
Read MoreTHE FIELD OF ENGAGEMENT
I am intrigued by the possibilities for complexity in a painting - not through indeterminacy but through specificity: a painting that grabs you from quite a distance; its character revealed in an essential way. The work’s character continues to enrich this experience as you near it; only now the subtleties of colour relationship takes over; finally the surface nuance reveals itself.
Read MorePAINTINGS AND ARTISTS FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 3
At the same time as so many younger artists were working out of cubism, some of the great artists of the late nineteenth century were either entering their old age or nearing the end of their lives: it must have been an intriguing artistic landscape to be alive in. These were the last years of Edgar Degas: a difficult character, by all accounts,
Read MorePAINTINGS AND ARTISTS FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 2
…The name Cézanne immediately conjures up images of choppy interwoven brushstrokes. At first glance, his mature paintings have the appearance of a distinctively systematic approach – every painting just screams “Cézanne”, but to generalise about his painting in this way is a misreading, as throughout his work we find a remarkable breadth of enquiry.
Read MoreSPACE (Part 2)
…In short, don’t go looking for pictorial illusions, but deal with the space you have available to you and maximise that. Let the space develop accordingly – illusions will occur with colour and do not need the added choreography behind them.
Read MoreSPACE (Part 1)
…Figurative space is indeterminate because of its duality. That duality is its virtue. Take a good painting of a landscape for example and that painting does not rely on its physical size to deliver its content as much as its illusory relationship, through rendering, suggestion or even evocation, to a known – external – reality.
Read MorePaintings and Artists from the Twentieth Century: 1
…..During the same year that Picasso was mooching about Montmartre, Matisse was down in Collioure, towards the Spanish border, painting some of his greatest – soon to be known as – Fauvist works. His Landscape at Collioure (1905), a study for the seminal Bonheur de Vivre, is a work that I have prized all my adult life – so much so that in my twenties I made a special journey to Copenhagen to see it.
Read MoreBONNARD'S FIGURATIVE SPACE IN CONTEXT
Bonnard’s “The Studio with Mimosa” 1939 at The Pompidou, Paris is an intriguing painting - a slow meditation on colour and space. I have become increasingly fascinated with Bonnard's work of late (partly due to a course on colour in painting I am running at the RA with guest lecturer Nicholas Watkins). I was previously unsure about his colour which at times looks laboured or even sour in patches; in so many paintings though, he quite wilfully moves your eyes about, as things quietly emerge into focus: heads; fruit; cups; chairs, all seem to materialise covertly without you noticing it. Bonnard seems to create "peripheries" which exist ironically, right in front of you,
Read MoreSEQUENCES
These 8 images show the development of a recent painting. There were a number of colour decisions, not photographed here, made in between several of the stages but the general development of colour and line in the painting can be seen. This work had a particular "temperature" that was emerging and I kept working, painting it out and in to fine tune that temperature. The final painting (number 8) is called "The Squeeze" 2018 acrylic on canvas and is 130cm x 80cm wide. This painting underwent further revisions before completion.
Movement
Movement is different in sculpture and painting. By movement I do not mean capturing something in movement or even moving things around as in a kinetic sculpture. Movement starts firstly as the harnessing of actions made in a “fluid decision space”, where things can change and adjust as they take shape. Secondly it is about our eyes’ responses to differences. We have evolved as a species to scan a distant horizon and they swoop our gaze to a scrutinise something held in our hands
Read More2017 information
I have recently had a book published on my work. It is part discursive, instructive, theoretical and reflective. It covers paintings from my student days up to the present. Some of the content that been written after experiences gained through teaching my classes at the Royal Academy. The book is available in paperback and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers. Please see the link on the announcement bar at the top of the website to the Amazon listing.
I was delighted this year to have my website archived by the National Library of Wales as a site of historical importance to the culture of Wales.
New Paintings
I have just stretched up my most recent paintings. 9 new works which were started in the early Spring. 3 of them: "This Way Up", "Jump" and "Tick Tock" all feature in my book on "Abstract Art and Abstraction: They have a new attention to line with a number of looping linear passages working their way through the painting, enclosing or opening up around and about passages of colour. - sometimes locking in colour "chords".
Read MoreMusical spaces
(Blog app testing) Rock and roll looks to be the music of relationships; jazz feels like a music of community - it feeds off an audience and classical music is the music of solitude. Similarly painting operates in these ways in people’s lives.
Open Sculpture and Language
At a recent Brancaster Chronicle whilst Tony Smart, it occurred to me that the language used to describe the work often ran into conflicts. Smart's work is radical and exciting and is part of an unfolding of work which could be categorised as "Open Sculpture". Below are some thoughts on the language used or touched upon in a Chronicle such as this and the respective possible meanings of certain words. Please comment if you wish. (the Chronicle will be posted on the branchron.com site shortly)
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