Paintings and Drawings

By Tasha Prest-Smith

Born in 1929, Evelyn Williams is still working now at the age of 77. This impressive collection showcases 40 selected paintings and drawings from the past 20 years, and has a distinctive style and mood. The paintings are raw, sparse and simplistic with a sombre, almost depressive tone.

The selection poignantly charts the human lifespan, from infancy to old age. The felicitous rubs shoulders with the sorrowful; the intimate togetherness in Loving and Baby Playing with Mother is juxtaposed against the dark, depersonalised couple crying in Grieving, and the loneliness and fear inherent in Seeing the Light, portraying an old woman sitting alone in a bare room. Migration depicts a mass of people running with outstretched arms and open mouths, revealing the desperation often associated with modern immigration.

Perhaps Williams’s most credible feature is her ability to avoid romanticising people, as she reveals their plainness and signs of age. Most striking is how she strips her subjects to a basic humanity, challenging the binary opposition of male/female by incorporating androgyny in her work.