Evelyn Williams 'Intimate Whispers'

Evelyn Williams
Intimate Whispers

“Her work deserves to be as well-known as those of her fellow 1961 John Moores prize-winners,
Blake, Blow, Hockney, Kitaj, Kossoff, McWilliam and Uglow.”
Huon Mallalieu

Evelyn Williams ‘Intimate Whispers’
Anima Mundi are delighted to present
‘Intimate Whispers’, by pioneering
British painter Evelyn Williams.
Arguably less known that many of her
male contemporaries, despite winning
the John Moores Prize for sculpture,
Williams produced an unrivalled body
of work, unguardedly expressing
the wide ranging complexities of the
human condition.
Evelyn Williams was born in 1929 and
trained at St Martin’s School of Art from
the age of 15 and then the Royal College
of Art working alongside the older, largely
male students, many of them soldiers
returning from service in the second world
war. Despite failing health she continued
painting right up to her death in 2012
at the age of 83. Her tender, intimate
and emotional paintings are concerned
with the subtleties and complexities of
relationships and the human predicament.
Her very personal paintings have followed
her progress through life as child, lover,
mother and grandmother. She talked of
her work with self-effacement but her
words provide epitaphs: “After all the
attempts at movement, the pulling and
pushing of forms, the agitation – here all
goes still and I have a sense of relief the
figure is asleep and has found rest.”
Williams proved difficult for some to
categorise during her life time, but is
regarded, along with friends such as
Paula Rego, as having forged a path
for female artists. She later founded a
trust in her name which has done modest
but important work to support artists,
particularly women, and the practice
of drawing.
In 1961 Evelyn Williams won first prize for
sculpture in the John Moores competition
and over the years had recognition in many
public galleries including a retrospective
exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
in 1972. Her work is in numerous public and
private collections, including the Victoria
and Albert Museum; Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford; New Hall, Cambridge; the National
Museum of Wales; the Contemporary Art
Society for Wales; and the British Arts
Council. 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.
‘Intimate Whispers’ offers a selection of
uniquely honest paintings, dealing with
the intimate connection and profound
solitude of existence, taking the viewer on
a profound journey from womb to tomb.

Sleeping Baby
1996, oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm
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The Ritual
2008, oil on canvas, 122 x 152 cm
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The Doll I
2002, oil on canvas, 46 x 62 cm
The Doll II
2002, oil on canvas, 46 x 62 cm
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Togetherness
1996, oil on canvas, 122 x 152 cm
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Talking Mouths I
1997, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm
Talking Mouths II
1997, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm
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Conversations
1976, charcoal on paper, 85 x 43 cm
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Kissing Lovers
1997, oil on board, 19 x 19 cm
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Nature of Love
1999, oil on canvas, 91 x 76 cm
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Untitled
1992, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm
Untitled
1992, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm
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Death and the Maiden I
1996, oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm
Death and the Maiden II
1996, oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm
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Mother Singing I
2001, oil on canvas, 36 x 46 cm
Mother Singing II
2001, oil on canvas, 36 x 46 cm
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Evelyn Williams by John McEwen
We live in dangerous and vulgar times
when, as the poet and painter William Blake
wrote of his own industrially-shattered age,
“commerce hangs on every tree.”
Perhaps at any time true artists are few in
number, but at the beginning of the 21st
century when contemporary art has never
enjoyed so much attention or attracted so
much money, there seems a particular dearth
of the inspiring, nourishing, consoling,
enlightening article. What we particularly
yearn for is some product of the visual
imagination to contemplate, to help us
by-pass the mundane maelstrom, to enable
us to re-discover ourselves, opening, “inner
thoughts, other worlds”.
Those last words were written by Evelyn
Williams, whose art is the nearest
contemporary equivalent of William Blake’s,
a refuge from desecration. Like Blake,
whom she venerates, she has an equal
regard for the written word and since 1990
has kept notebooks, some of their contents
now published, in which her search for
truth is as rigorous as in her sculptures and
pictures. “I paint what I know and not what
is here, and since I work from a memory
that is unreliable, how am I to know what
is fact and at what point does memory stop
and invention begin?”
Meeting Evelyn Williams one is struck
by her poise. She says she is not religious
but she radiates the calm associated with
contemplatives. She sits up straight, speaks
gently, yet voices firm opinions. She has
a ready humour and delightful laugh. She
dresses neatly in mute colours. Her rooms
are precise and spotless, the hue of the
carpeting exactly pitched between blue and
grey, her palette similarly restrained, the
neat blobs of paint ranging from blue to
white with only a fleck or two from the
warm end of the spectrum. Colour is outside
in the patio garden, where Welsh poppies
(she is Welsh) hit high notes of yellow
and the trellised honeysuckle is allowed
its unruly way. She describes herself as
puritan: surface calm, inner passion. She
hates the sugar-pink blossom of ornamental
cherry trees.
To write about an artist is always daunting,
the more so when the artist in question
has verbally analysed her feelings with
such precision. Nicholas Usherwood, whose
career as an administrator and critic has
been notable for its support and respect for
artists, takes due note. In his thoughtful
and observant essay he warns us against
the inadequacy of the words commonly
used to convey Evelyn Williams’ art:
visionary, feminist, Romantic, apocalyptic,
expressionist, Gothic, outsider. It pains
me to admit I have been guilty on most
counts but of course he is right. 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”.
Many artists have testified to the crucial
importance of first experience. Evelyn
Williams reckons the legacy of early
emotional rupture has been permanent
“feelings of loss”; but innate shyness proved
a surprising compensation, making her
an intensely sharp and sensitive observer,
especially of social interaction. That she
took slowly to reading and writing only
increased her subsequent respect for words.
“I need the depth and anger of the sea,
the restlessness. I need to be engulfed by
its vastness.
I need the freedom of the wind. I need to be
sucked up by it and scattered over all the
world.
I need love most of all.
Like a great sponge I could soak up all the
love that has ever been.
And I should still be thirsty.
———
The role of lover was over far too quickly,
that of wife never ending whilst that of
mother the one I enjoyed the most, got the
most pleasure from and the most pain, and
that of grandmother an unexpected bonus of
unbelievable delights.
My state of reverie is maintained by close
attention to the physical details of my life.
Protected from and on occasion engulfed by
the trivia of existence, my goal has always
been to find the moment when all goes still,
when my heart cocooned in calm allows the
tiny seed of an idea to grow. From such
tenuous beginnings the embryo of an image
will form.
There is a line to be drawn between sleep
and wakefulness when I am suspended
and floating between the two. It’s then
that I listen to my other self and drift in
this non-place which I recognise as a safe
haven, which I prefer to any other. My
life is illuminated by these states – they
seem to have more relevance than waking
experiences, which cannot match the other
for beauty and tranquillity, or offer such
happiness.”
She makes frequent allusion to dreams
and reverie. Many of her visions have the
limitless scale and incongruity of dreams,
sometimes of nightmares, and her subjects
often seem to be dreaming, whether asleep
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or awake. One is powerfully reminded of the
human condition so perfectly encapsulated
by Shakespeare: “We are such stuff as
dreams are made on, and our little life is
rounded in a sleep.”
But, as she says, she has also paid close
attention to the physical details of her life,
and just as the sea fired her imagination
in Suffolk, so did the contrastingly dark
and claustrophobic landscape of Wales,
when Summerhill was evacuated to Blaenau
Ffestiniog in 1939. “The apocalyptic
landscape is the one I can relate to,”
she admits, and surely slate mountains
and hallowed woods were rain to her
Welsh roots.
Evelyn Williams once said: “If I have any
admirers at all, they tend to be women.” She
was asked what these women said. “That’s
just how I feel”, was the reply. As one of
her numerous male fans I appreciate that
women may be able to empathise with many
of these images – none more than those
of motherhood – closer than we men can.
Nonetheless, men will find ample reason for
saying that is just how they feel, sometimes
with a smile at absurdity, other times with a
frown of sadness or trepidation.
She also has that hallmark of many of the
finest artists in being hypersensitive to
the transitoriness of life and ever-presence
of death, never more so than in her latest
paintings. She speaks 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.” No words could better describe
the effect of her art or its legacy to the
yet unborn.
John McEwen, 1998
Evelyn Williams had many admirers, here
are the words of some:
“The art world half-a-century ago, when Evelyn
Williams began her career, was a macho preserve.
Since then there has been the successful feminist
revolution, at least in the arts, and the situation
has reversed. In art schools female students
outnumber the male. Women artists, like Evelyn,
who managed to establish themselves before the
sea-change, are heroic pioneers. She has blazed a
trail in the most universal subject of all, human
relationships - en masse, in groups, families,
couples or concentrating solitude. She has done
this with the vision of a poet and the empathy of
a wife, mother and grandmother. The result, as
subtle in technique as it is profound in feeling
and visionary in scope, has no equivalent.”
John McEwen
“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”
Fay Weldon
“I have lived with Evie’s painting for years, and
have looked at it every day, and it has filled me
with pleasure. It is both clear and mysterious,
painted with sensitivity and love.”
Paula Rego
“A more personal intimate whispered, less
institutional art, I have never seen”
David Lee in Art Review, 1997
“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”
Sister Wendy Beckett
“I can’t think of any contemporary British
painter who impresses me more.”
Sir Kyffin Williams
Anima Mundi would like to give posthumous
thanks to Evelyn Williams for her significant
contribution. Our gratitude also to the
Evelyn Williams Trust for their support with
this exhibition
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Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with Evelyn Williams ‘Intimate Whispers’
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