Vivienne Williams

October 26, 2014 3 Comments
Crocus bowl, red chillies and jar

Crocus bowl, red chillies and jar

Still life as a genre has a long history. Pictures of plenty – fruits of nature arranged by human hand – are common on Roman painted walls and mosaics. Renaissance artists picked out collections of food, natural and prepared, from the incidental details of medieval paintings and placed them centre stage. The golden age of the still life as a separate genre, though, was the golden age of the Low Countries, the seventeenth century, when artists of the highest skills and reputation specialised in vivid and hyper-meticulous accounts of tables loaded with vegetables, fruit, flowers and other objects.

At the risk of over-simplifying you could say there were two traditions at work in still life, the ethical and the formal. Many Dutch still lives are conventionally labelled as vanitas paintings. Among the luscious fruits, overflowing baskets and brimming glasses the artist places intimations of mortality: plums that are over-ripe and starting to decay; goblets lying on their sides, empty; an hourglass, a candle burning low or the worn pages of a book. Some pictures are more explicit and include human skulls. Ostensibly at least, viewers are invited to contemplate the evanescence of earthly existence and to redirect their attention to the simpler essentials of the Christian life.

But the overlaying of a moral message has never expunged the artist’s more basic interest in the formal potential of painting objects, living and inanimate, in a domestic setting. The possibilities of colour, texture and composition are all as multitudinous as in any grander genre. That is why still life, an antique province of the art universe, has retained its appeal, right up to our own time.

Still life with three figs

Still life with three figs

The Swansea painter Vivienne Williams has stayed true to still life all through her career so far (she became a full-time artist in 1990). Like Pieter Claez, Willem Claeszoon Heda and Ambrosius Bosschaert in seventeenth century Holland, she’s never strayed from a preoccupation with how to arrange a few simple domestic objects against a plain background. Her current solo exhibition of 28 paintings in the Attic Gallery in Swansea gives us a chance to watch the full range of her skills at work.

What you see on the walls is described easily enough. Most of the pictures show pots, jugs and bowls, sometimes empty but usually full of fruit or flowers. Other fruits or vegetables lie, whole or halved, alongside on a table. Sometimes the edge of the table and a plain background are visible, sometimes not. The objects occasionally overlap, more often they maintain a respectful distance, each quietly occupying its own small space.

Strawberry bowl

Strawberry bowl

This has been Vivienne’s visual world for 25 years. All this time she’s remained true to a small set of motifs and their arrangement. A close student of her work could point out some slight changes along the way. Her earliest work featured long friezes of flowers, typically tulips. These flower rows have grown rarer, although there are still echoes in this show. Objects organised in two rows, one above another, have become common. From time to time a new subject makes a shy entrance: I’d not noticed strawberries appearing in pictures before this exhibition.

The moulding of objects and the placing of them in relation to one another and to the table are the result of long periods of thought and experiment. Bowls, jugs and flasks show a subtle asymmetry, and tables a sort of reverse perspective, growing narrower towards the foreground. At first sight all the compositions look static, until you notice that bowls often lean towards the viewer, offering the fruit they contain like hands bearing a gift; the crocuses are gently nodding; and the vertically placed black beans and red chillies dance before you (in one painting the beans playfully form a ‘W’ monogram). Perky strawberries float through space. A jugful of azaleas seems to burn white against its dark background, surrounded by a shining aura.

Azaleas

Azaleas

From the beginning Vivienne has been loved as a colourist of rare talent. In her pictures the colours work their magic in a particular way: not usually through any sensuous process of one melting into another, because the forms of the objects are usually distinct and apart. Instead, the colours call clearly across to one another in the way voices do in renaissance music, each distinct but recombining and chiming in the mind. Some colours are mild and pastel-like, but others are surprisingly sonorous. Just occasionally a much darker tone is sounded and reverberates beyond the picture’s frame. Over time, I think, the range of colours has widened slightly, and combinations are bolder than they were.

One reason why the colours are so powerful is the surfaces they emerge from. The final texture of a painting is hard won. It’s the result of a long period of treating the paper they’re always painted on: painting and over-painting, sanding, scratching, staining and rubbing back. A field – a fruit or a bowl or a background – may look uniform from a distance. But close up you can begin to make out the layers of paint; tiny embedded fragments of sand; rucks and ridges in the underlying paper; small glyphs (flights of miniature arrows, navies of tiny boats) inscribed with a stylus into the paint. Together they build to a rich surface, a palimpsest that bears evidence of maybe weeks of work and re-work. Palimpsest is an apt metaphor, for two reasons: close up, you could easily imagine that what lies under the paint is parchment, not mere paper; and the multiple ‘texts’ written on it over time are only partly visible.

Kitchen still life with lemons, apple and beans

Kitchen still life with lemons, apple and beans

By putting all these elements together – composition, colour and surface – and reading the titles of her works (‘Kitchen still life with lemons, apple and beans’), you might come to the conclusion that Vivienne lies on the formal wing of the still life tradition. But that wouldn’t do justice to something that lives deep down in almost all the works, and especially in the intensive processes that have given rise to them. It would be fanciful to claim that they hold an ethical content – warnings about the ‘vanity of vanities’ is the last thing on Vivienne’s mind – but what they do possess is a determined search for harmony: not just a visual harmony, but a corresponding human harmony, a learned stillness of mind. Vivienne has long been influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, which emphasises the importance of achieving tranquillity through removing mental obstruction. Her paintings are more than self-complete formal compositions. They do hold an intent, for those open to their invitation.

Bowl

Bowl

For me there are three small paintings in this exhibition that stand out. One is a still life, the others are not. All three are compositions stripped to a bare minimum.

‘Bowl’ is simply that: an empty, plain white bowl, islanded on a dark background (no table is visible). As usual it’s slightly asymmetrical and has no decoration, only a ring close to its mouth, and a narrow foot. Its surface, though, is highly complex: worked over again and again, its base white modulated with blue and other colours, and with different marks scratched through the top-level paint. But what the eye gravitates to is the rim of the bowl, near the top of the picture. Here is a thin but opulent line, partly of gold, a line from which the bowl seems to hang and which gives it power to shine in the enveloping darkness.

Stripped of any association with companionable objects, the bowl holds its unsupported position, an emblem maybe for the human mind reduced to its own irreducible minimum. Whether that position is a positive one – distractions have been banished in favour of concentrated enlightenment – or a negative one, is left to the viewer.

Green hill

Green hill

The other two (linked) paintings, equally spare, are ‘landscapes’ (very rare in Vivienne’s work). ‘Green hill’ might be a scene at dusk. The hill is in shadow, its contours suggested by wrinkles in the paper surface, and by green and yellow variations in the otherwise dark paint. The concave strip of sky, its light oppressed by the dark below, is a fragile, bluey turquoise. Between sky and hilltop hovers a vague temporary meniscus. Soon, you feel, the light will fade over the hill and night will occupy the whole scene.

Cornfield

Cornfield

Where ‘Green hill’ hints at the ‘dying of the light’, ‘Cornfield’ seems more explicit, and contains more movement within it. A gorgeous streak of gold marks the field of corn. The gold is exactly the gold you can see in the cornfield in the background of Samuel Palmer’s work, painted in his ‘visionary’ Shoreham period around 1830, (mis-)called The magic apple tree. Its right and bottom edges are ragged and becoming lost in a darkness that is swiftly invading its brightness. The dark is moving in a clockwise swirl, indicated by the brushstrokes but also by the paper, that has been dragged after the brush, ploughing the surface into parallel curved furrows. Above, a thin, stuttering line of bright red paint arcs across the picture: red the colour of blood rather than of any sunset.

These three works seem like a new departure for Vivienne. But I may be wrong (I have been in the past), and wrong too in my all-too-Dutch interpretation of their significance. But I do feel on solid ground in thinking that they are fine achievements – pictures that, like the best of Vivienne’s paintings all through her career, repay close attention, again and again.

Vivienne Williams

Comments (3)

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  1. Meg Wallace says:

    Marvellous piece on V Williams thank you

  2. An excellent appreciation of Vivienne’s work. I have known her for a long time and don’t doubt her dedication and immersion in her work. Its distinctive quality for me is its calmness which I am sure is an outward manifestation of her spiritual credo.

  3. mary oliver says:

    I enjoyed this perceptive over-view of Vivienne’s work. It highlights the subtle developments that have occurred in her paintings over the years, while also pointing out consistencies of purpose, the faithfulness to mood.

    The fascinating weathered surfaces that she creates are difficult to appreciate in reproduction but are so well-described here, you do almost feel as if they are within range.

    It’s some years since I saw her work in the flesh. This article has made me realize how badly I need a fix of her lovely vision. I must get to her next show.

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