watercolour – Like It Was Done By A Toddler

And the Wolf (2019, watercolour on paper)

This brooding work steps away from her recent Abstract Expressionist themes to explore her feminist influences. Williams situates herself here not just in an artistic tradition but explicitly within a female one, in the work’s clear allusion both to the spare yet energetic, fraying lines and the passionate social engagement of Nancy Spero, but also…

Visiting artist: Shingle Street (2019, mixed media)

This charming landscape by visiting artist Dorothy Locke dialogues with Williams’ Lamdscapes series and is inspired by the famous ‘Shingle Street’ stretch of houses along a stony Suffolk beach. Rich with the warm colours of a summer holiday and redolent with the warm glow of childhood nostalgia, the work both draws us back into our…

I Contain Multitudes (2019, watercolour on paper)

This striking watercolour sees the artist engaging with contemporary ‘splatter’ painters such as Matthew Munsey, as well as a bold monochromatic tone in deepest Prussian blue. The dramatic effect created by folding the two ‘splattered’ halves of the work together, mirroring the painted areas over one another, creates a dramatic effect reminiscent of insect shapes,…

Archetypes 4: Pegasus (2018, watercolour)

The artist returns to her Archetypes series with a high-octane rendition of one of the most represented figures from Greek mythology: Pegasus, the winged stallion born from Medusa’s death and ridden by Bellerophon in his battle against the Chimera. The blurring and indistinct forms give the sense of movement at great speed: winged horse and…

Archetypes 3: Et In Arcadia Ego (2018, tempera)

This plangent piece returns to the mysterious territory between landscape and archetype with a tempera work that draws on the delicate landscape palette of Poussin, the bold, furious brushwork of Jackson Pollock and the famous memento mori hidden in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Et In Arcadia Ego responds to the theme of a morally ambiguous garden…

Archetypes 2: Titan (2018, watercolour)

This dramatic piece develops the artist’s characteristic ‘impasto’ technique, creating light by working into the surface to render rough areas of paint smooth and lucent, creating areas of a dreamlike violet within the energetic, almost violent textures of clashing and blending purple and gold. The Titans, gigantic children of earth and heaven, rebelled against their…

Landscapes 6: The House In The Woods (2018, watercolour)

This evocative work revisits a more traditional use of watercolour paint but retains the artist’s characteristic bold brushwork, offering up a landscape of shadowed forms and far-flung perspective that hints at faraway topographies of mystery and longing. Though included in the ‘Landscapes’ series it is more of a ‘landscape of the soul’, that tempts the…