Charles Williams, My Animal Nature

24 Feb-16 Apr 2022

2021

Overview

Charles Williams' work is a dialogue between him in his studio, paintings that seem to gain holds on him and stories and ideas that hang around in both his imagination and memory. – Joseph Highmore’s Mr Oldham And His Guests, Annibale Carracci’s The Butcher’s Shop, Daniel Stringer’s 1776 self-portrait are notable works that do this for Williams. Evelyn Waugh described his friend Anthony Powell’s fictional characters as being like fish that come towards you in their tank, look at you for a while and then disappear into the murk, and that seems an apt analogy to Williams' painting process.

Williams' most recent work stems from his feelings of a need to create a presence, without telling a story that relates to class, privilege, wealth or any of the cultural web that surrounds human beings, or at least partially escapes it. The temporary flight from depicting people and leaning towards animals in his work is a new exploration. Williams refers to explaining animals through their relationships with us, metaphorical, allegorical, analogical, and the belief that this encounter with them is doomed to be one-sided.

A question embedded in his practice, is that as he fumbles around is can he escape this cultural web and what would that look like? It feels like mud sucking at your boots sometimes, but at others, it’s as if he were standing on the shoulders of giants, lifted off by what they’ve done and what he can do.