Constance Williams
ABOUT
Born in Somerset England, Williams became enamored with all the arts from an early age. By the age of eight, she was an accomplished pianist, played multiple instruments, painted in various mediums and sculpted with anything she could lay her hands on. In her early teens, Williams excelled at sculpture and continued painting in multiple mediums. At seventeen she majored in art and was a film intern in London. Her move to the US saw her start an award-winning international greeting card company. Her move to Asheville NC in 2004 was the impetus to propel her professional career as a full-time artist. She delved back into sculpture with great success in 2005, and it was her use of waxes in 2006 on a post-fired sculptural work that forayed her into painting with encaustic for the next ten years. In 2015, she added alcohol ink to her repertoire, which she used with her encaustic paint medium. In 2016-2019, saw the exclusive use of alcohol ink and experimentation on different substrates. The summer of 2018, she re-erected her sculpture studio conjoining paint and sculpture in the same space, select works in clay with alcohol ink will make their debut at her first gallery show in 2019.
Through her exploration of color and its impact on visual beauty, Williams continues to emphasize the emotional, expressive, and pictorial qualities that are found in abstract art, using shapes, colors, forms, and gestural marks to achieve her desired effects. Williams’ paintings are a celebration of geological environments re-imagined, of their delicate and ephemeral seasons, of their ability to regenerate, revive and restore. These very contrasts—between the beauty of decay and renewal and the joyfulness of reinterpretation—are at the core of her practice.
MEDIUM & PROCESS
Williams creates her signature work by blending an alcohol-based, acid-free, highly pigmented fluid paint medium on non-porous surfaces; mostly polycarbonate coated aluminum panels. She uses compressed air and gravitational techniques in multiple layers to capture an arena of colors. Inspired by natures structure from a topographical viewpoint, Williams flattens perspective with her trademark patterning of spherical, striated and a combinative patterning. She has developed a unique style into a re-imagined rhythmic visual dialogue that is soothing and stimulating.
INSPIRATION
Constance draws inspiration from originators such as Frankenthaler, Still, and Rothko, among others. Also, the historical legend of Black Mountain College, near her home in Asheville, fosters a strong sense of individuality and creative intensity in the region. The work of its faculty and students revolutionized the arts and science scenes in the second half of the twentieth century. Among the best-known affiliates were Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Motherwell. Their legacy continues to reverberate and inspire the next art movement in Western North Carolina.
