EVELYN WILLIAMS
'INTIMATE WHISPERS'

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.

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 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