Evelyn Williams: Tender, intimate and emotional paintings

The "tender, intimate and emotional paintings" of Evelyn Williams "are concerned with the subtleties and complexities of relationships and the human predicament." Her work explored human relationships by establishing formal rhythmic relationship between figures and by charging them with intense emotion. "Her very personal paintings followed her progress through life as child, lover, mother and grandmother."

From tomorrow the Martin Tinney Gallery has an exhibition of approximately 25 works which features the last paintings she worked on. "These are powerful, haunting paintings which, fully aware that her health was declining rapidly, show the artist facing her own mortality with her customary directness and tenderness."

Fay Weldon has said: “Evelyn Williams’ work is imbued by an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness. It is 'awesome' - if we can get back to the true sense of the word. It fills you with awe. In its restraint, its gravity, the sense it imparts of female endurance, female beauty, the power and seriousness of love between woman and child, woman and woman, man and woman, her sheer courage in taking on board the nature of the universe in its most unsmiling mode, it achieves greatness, and will outlast all of us”

Sister Wendy Beckett says: “All Evelyn’s work has a deep contemplative stillness within it. The dignity of her figures – women above all – is a consequence of their listening hearts. Looking at Evelyn’s paintings I think of Keats “Unheard Melodies” … love is her theme”

Williams' work has synergies with that of Eileen Cooper, Marlene Dumas and Ana Maria Pacheco, among others.

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John Keats - Ode On A Grecian Urn.

Evelyn Williams R.I.P.

Evelyn Williams was an artist in whom 'From her earliest drawings, vision, dream and reality combined; she characterised her work as "inner thoughts, other worlds".'

John McEwan wrote that 'In his thoughtful and observant essay [Nicholas Usherwood] warns us against the inadequacy of the words commonly used to convey Evelyn Williams’ art: visionary, feminist, Romantic, apocalyptic, expressionist, Gothic, outsider ... Robust generalisation is peculiarly unsuited to an art of such delicacy of feeling, subtlety of tone and exact observation. As he writes: ‘Peel away all those labels however and Evelyn Williams will, I believe, emerge finally, and not before time, as a painter and sculptor, most fundamentally, of ‘people and their attempts to relate to one another’.'

Fay Weldon described Williams' work as ‘awesome’ – 'if we can get back to the true sense of the word. It fills you with awe.' Williams had created, Weldon thought, 'a body of work, imbued by an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness.'

She spoke of death in typically consoling terms as a space filled with as much energy as the sky is filled with raindrops in a summer storm: ‘As each drop falls and touches the earth seeds of new energy are released to be recycled again and again.’

Read obituaries from The Guardian and Telegraph here and here.

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The Doors - People Are Strange.