A Painter for the Ages
Alice Williams makes magic on canvas, sharing home, garden, and global travel in her work.
“Color is the language of creativity,” Alice Williams avers. “And I am in love with it. To master color is to communicate beauty.”
In paintings that please the eye, kindle the emotions, and stir the imagination, Williams shares her love of travel, cultural diversity, the natural word, and more than anything else, her refined appreciation for those harmonious intersections of humanity and nature where balance is sublime, light is right, and caring cultivation yields beauty of universal allure. From her studio near Atlanta or from the easel she has worked on in Africa, England, France, Mexico, South America, and other countries in Europe, Williams has spent forty years mastering the art and science of making paintings that transcend the strictures of time.
“Composition is the foundation of a great painting. Drawing is the structure. And color is the beauty,” elaborates Williams. “Without these, great painting doesn’t happen.” Although she didn’t know them personally, Williams has enough affinity for the works of Post-impressionist painters Vuillard, Bonnard, Klimt, and Toulouse-Lautrec to consider them mentors. Originality fills their work, and originality fills Williams’ work. They have all taken the counsels left by prior masters in their works, and then built something fresh and new on that indispensable infrastructure.
Born in Boston, Alice began her artistic development in an environment that exposed her to great music, classical dance, and the summits of great painting. Her mother was a professional pianist who filled her home with music and with the paintings she acquired on frequent trips to Europe and Asia; her father was a quality control engineer who excelled at devising ways to make things better. Aesthetic awareness, self-discipline and a love of study and practice came naturally to Alice as she gravitated from music and dance to drawing and painting. These offered the best mix of creative possibilities, personal satisfaction, and professional prospects.
Now in her 40th year as a professional painter, Alice still loves the challenges painting presents, logistically and artistically. She began her undergraduate fine arts studies at Columbia College, South Carolina, continued at Furman University, and finished at Clemson University, where she met her husband, Don. His work for IBM took the couple to Dallas, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Atlanta, and Alice sought out the best private teachers in each place. She took workshops in oil, acrylic, and watercolor in Charlotte, figurative drawing in Dallas, pen and ink techniques in Arlington, portraiture with some pastel in Atlanta, more portraiture in Baltimore, and figurative sculpture in Paris, among others. Her most influential teachers were Russian masters, Constantine and Roman Chatov. Like Alice, Constantine had started out as a musician, but for different reasons, became a master painter. She spent three days a week for three years, studying with the Chatovs in Atlanta.
“I had been studying art and selling my work for 17 years when I started with the Chatovs,” Alice recalls. “I always had excellent teachers, but for me, everything just came together with the Chatovs—drawing the human figure with straight lines, warm and cool skin tones, and understanding how they turn each other on, the compositional indispensability of circles and triangles, and so much more.” Having for a time begun with pen and ink renderings of homes, Alice spent the next 12 years as a portrait artist. Her fee rose 750 percent in that time because Williams made certain her clients were always happy. Still, she longed for greater creative freedom than formal, commissioned portraiture allows. Since 1994 she has painted in all subject areas, exploring the visible world with high creative energy and a highly refined eye. Success with the public has rewarded Williams consistently from her first juried show in 1974 to her present count of more than 30 one-woman shows. Williams, her paintings, and her other creative achievements, an amazing home and gardens, have been the subjects of 14 articles in major publications.
Alice and her husband bought 2 ½ acres of land outside Atlanta in 1980 and began designing their dream home, studio, and gardens. They eventually built it from the inside out, opening it to 360 degrees of views and filling the interior spaces with light. Much of the inspiration for the design of the house and of the gardens comes from the couple’s two and a half years living in Herriard, Hampshire, England, and their two years living in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris. Composing the garden design as she would a painting, Williams considered positive and negative space, interplay of diagonal lines and axes, curvilinear forms, and color, amazing, organic color. The gardens are now a favorite gathering place for the Williams, their friends, their grown children, and others including the artists who take the workshops she teaches twice a year. Considering herself lucky to have had a broad exposure to the best instruction available in the U. S. early-on in her career, Williams pays it forward in her workshops, imparting to others the accumulated knowledge of extensive training and four decades of practice, practice, practice. Her workshops are usually filled before the dates are announced.
Although she once had her own darkroom and fully appreciates fine art photography, Williams discourages painting from photographs. She insists on drawing from life and from memory. “I could never get bored with drawing,” says Williams. “It is essential to my paintings, but it’s also an art unto itself.” She still travels with her husband, frequently, extensively, and always equipped to paint and draw in a variety of artistically rife settings. She recently brought back 33 paintings from a three-month trip to Africa and is already planning another painting trip to that continent this summer.
With experience has come a greater reliance on inner resources. Her travels and home life have given her an image bank that allows more intuitive flow in her process. “I know how light works; I understand so much more about color; the problem-solving is done. Now I can put more of my own feelings into the work,” says Alice. Her paintings reflect her passions, and she groups these into nine categories: interiors, beach scenes, landscapes, rooftops, still lifes, Africa, gardens, figures, and harbor views. In each subject area, Williams applies her arsenal of talent, training, and passion to the pursuit of greatness. Her ambition has always been to be, and to encourage her students to be, not just good, but the best. She achieves this in her paintings, again and again, taking the spectator on interior and exterior voyages in sublime close-up and in breathtaking panorama. Words that come to mind when viewing her work are beautiful, dramatic, original, peaceful, intimate, refined, wild, elegant, amazing, and an absolute pleasure to behold.