Bruce Williams
Bruce Williams is an artist who lives and works in St. Leonards on Sea on the East Sussex Coast.
Williams is primarily interested in the artistic process as a learning experience. He uses big sash brushes to create large bold paintings with an intensity and depth that can surprise both the onlooker and artist. A wide range of subjects are explored that ultimately invite the viewer to move in and out of the artwork in search of shape and salience amidst complex ambiguity.
Influenced by artists such as Kossoff, Bacon and Chaim Soutine, Williams constantly scrapes back the painting in a chaotic free reign of risk and chance, sometimes involving a change of medium, in an anxious search for truth, value, and matter of fact. The paintings acquire layers of ‘skin’ in a long process that finally gains more structure as Williams
stretches the materiality of the paint, pushing on through to arrive at an intricate and intense point of aesthetic communication. Williams comments:
“It is like the struggle with faith, something we can’t see or touch yet nevertheless sense is there.”
Bruce paints a diverse range of everyday objects such as a child’s swing, a ladder, a chicken brought home unplucked from the market, two garden bins, a self portrait. He does not see himself as an abstract artist, but rather as a part traditional, part contemporary, figurative, expressionist painter. His paintings reference, and the subject matter is directly confronted in a process to either create, or locate and uncover, some special aspect that allows it to be seen in a new exciting way.
Bruce Williams’ future work will include portraits. The paintings will eventually be larger, more analytical and personal, as he pursues and explores familiar themes, now matured and intensified by the passage of time.
We look forward to welcoming him to Six The Green this summer
