Artist : Evelyn Williams
Title : Talking Mouths
Medium : oil on canvas
Dimensions : 25 x 30 cm  | 9.8 x 11.8 in



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British painter Evelyn Williams, arguably less known that many of her male contemporaries, despite winning the John Moores Prize for sculpture, produced an unrivalled body of work, unguardedly expressing the wide ranging complexities of the human condition. She 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. 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, following her progress through life as child, lover, mother and grandmother. Williams' 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. 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”.

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. 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 and later founded a trust in her name which has done modest but important work to support artists, particularly women, and the practice of drawing.


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