Nick Williams  January 2012

Some have recently said that painting is now anti-Modernist, conceptually impotent or decadent.  I aim to overcome these threats by using knowledge and ideas of the Modern to explore my own interests in the current climate, while acknowledging achievements of the more distant past.  My work is a defying of labels through selected hybridity and liberation from genres. 

To outline my thinking and painting processes I will examine a recent work of my own, entitled: Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some.  My landscape is based on Breugel’s Return of the Hunters from 1565, depicting a bleak snow scene of dejected hunters returning home empty handed (frequently used as a Christmas card design).  Somewhere, somehow… was drawn free-hand from an internet image of the painting, keeping and deleting elements at will; the original was then disregarded.  The whole work was consequently taken over by a Fairfield Porter watercolour sky and acrylic paint thinned to a near-watercolour approach.  The colours and forms in the sky are echoed throughout the piece:  It has become a form of kitsch in its use of gratuitous multicolour.  A system of triangulation concerning palette and figures in groups of three characterises the piece.  My work becomes populated by numerous figures, mainly rock musicians and some others of personal reference. 

Traditional rules are simultaneously maintained and broken:  There is light, but no shadow; each area has been resolved and activated as a part geometric, part ambiguous abstract composition, informed by my interest in improvisation - The painting process has been treated as abstract, despite it clearly being a representational image.

I see the rock musician is an extreme version of the sad clown; the ecstatic highs and devastating lows, perhaps a reminder of what one should really be striving toward.  By depicting guitar players without their instruments I am able to isolate the individual.  They are all specific people sourced from internet videos; they become deformed and twisted apparitions after being sketched from a moving image, redrawn to fit the landscape and painted in as part of the whole.  I believe a reasonably high level of risk is required as this is where one’s ability becomes stretched, determined and the fulfilment of technique is permitted.