Simon Williams - Dynamism
Simon Williams paints intuitively. His paintings unfold and evolve during the days, weeks or even months over which they are built up. As he has noted, each mark he places on the canvas ‘compels a response’ and the addition of another balancing mark, acts continually to drive the work forward. By using synthetic acrylic paint Williams is able to see even the most liquid application dry within hours. However, fast though that may be, with this drying time between making each mark, it is worthwhile for the artist to work on several pieces at once moving from painting to painting, each laid out flat on the floor. When he is at work Williams’ studio is a riot of colours, some glistening above the surface of his paintings and other pools of liquid pigment scattered around in differently shaped cooking pots and pans.
A spectrum of vivid and intense colours makes Williams’ works appear forcefully alive and vital to the eye. Pure and hyper-saturated colours are applied straight from the tube and contrast with more delicate blends of subtle colour hues. The artist has a considerable understanding and control of his use of colour. Such an understanding is integral to his ability to construct the illusion of space that plays such a prominent role in his paintings.
It is in the titling of his work that we might most clearly be able to see Simon Williams’ intentions and interpretation of his own work. To an audience unfamiliar with the idea of purely abstract painting and more used to a traditional understanding of art as strictly serving the purpose of interpreting the world around us, the idea that Williams finds subjects within his works after they have been completed might seem particularly illogical. However, this way of titling work is entirely in keeping with the form of wholly abstract work that he is involved in making. As a painting sits against a far wall of the artist’s studio over the course of a few weeks it begins to assert its presence and titles present themselves from the suggestive and recognisable signs and forms which come forth from the pictures. It is relatively arbitrary and largely serves the sole purpose of distinguishing one work from another. Titling with no self-conscious edge – rather, existing as pure function. In this way giving works names liberates them, ready to go out into the world, as opposed to containing or suffocating them.
Williams’ paintings and the forms contained within them are about as ‘real’ as purely abstract painting can be. The imaginary structures found in them seem so clearly defined in pictorial space that we almost feel inclined to break the notional surface of each painting with our outstretched hands. Marrying this thought with the idea that the artist builds up his paintings, it starts to become clear that there are some very notable parallels between the way Williams works and that of three-dimensional, sculptural processes. This is perhaps the most sensible time at which to mention the artist’s previous professional incarnation – his fifteen or so years working in Animatronics. In seeing photographs of some of the complicated animated human forms and otherworldly animals he created for such high profile projects for television and film as Spitting Image and Harry Potter, one soon starts to make obvious parallels between his approaches to these two quite different disciplines. To see into one of the near complete mechanical heads stuffed with overlapping coloured wires, circuit boards and tiny motors, is to understand a little of the process by which the engineer, and in this case, also the artist, works.
In the making of Williams’ paintings and, indeed, his mechanical creatures, a kind of juggling act is required. Many separate but related parts, every one of which contributes to the effectiveness of the design, are fused, overlapped and fixed into place. What, on first inspection, might look like a tangled mess of different elements, is in fact the product of very considered labour, assembled with the patient hands of a master craftsman. The impulsive draw on the viewer of a recent short film documenting the full creation of one of Williams’ paintings illustrates the point that a large part of viewing the artist’s work is the addictive conundrum of attempting to unpick the chronology of his mark-making. The film separates every mark made or eradicated from those that came before it.
There are many artists in whom one might find a kindred spirit for Williams but the process by which his work is made, every mark of which represents a single turning within a labyrinth of potential forms and colours, is necessarily entirely his own. However, if we take one well-known Twentieth Century painter by way of comparison, that of the American Abstract Expressionist Willem De Kooning, we soon see some distinctive and fundamental differences between the processes employed by the two artists. De Kooning, although remarkably gestural and expressive, painted almost exclusively with the subject of a figure and occasionally landscape, in mind. He moves away from the subject until each picture contains mere traces of the initial inspiration and the structure hovers somewhere under the surface but it is always there informing and giving a dynamic underlying strength to the works. Since the Fauves, Cubists and arguably Cezanne before them, artists have been dismantling and reassembling the world around them. Contrastingly, Williams and other purely abstract artists who might most readily be put into the same camp as him such as Sam Francis, John Hoyland or Albert Irvin are constructing their own new worlds on canvas. It is the viewer who brings their own experiences and subliminal associations to the interpretation of these entirely abstract works.
Henry Garfit, Cornwall |
