This book presents a unique and long-overdue opportunity for the reader to access his art in all its range and variety, not least because its author, his daughter Evelyn A. Williams, provides access to paintings and drawings held by the family, rarely if ever seen before. What the book presents is a story of both an outstanding talent, praised world-wide, by the likes of Henry Moore and Salvador Dali, and a journey of searching integrity in which Williams placed the necessity of his vision before any urge to win the plaudits of fame and fortune in the art world. It is a story of a constant need to expand the forms of his art and to escape from constriction.
It begins in the narrative of a young artist whose exceptional promise brought him a scholarship and the means of escape from the complacent cultural backwardness of colonial British Guiana to the modernistic ferment of British art in the immediate post-war period. His time in England brought him the stimulus of working in the next-door studio to Francis Bacon, the enthusiastic patronage of Wyndham Lewis, and having work reserved by the Tate and featured in Time magazine. But although he secured cutting-edge exhibitions, and teaching posts at the Central School of Art and the Slade, Williams rebelled against being pigeon-holed. He objected to becoming typecast within the British Art establishment as a “Negro” artist.
Turning his back on growing success in Britain, Williams contemplated a return to a still pre-independent Guyana, but then did what many Caribbean artists and writers only talked about: made the return to Africa where he painted, wrote his outstanding novels, and engaged in important archaeological and art-historical work, culminating in his book, Icon and image: a study of sacred and secular forms of African classical art. In 1967 he returned to Guyana, where he farmed, continued to paint, pursued research into the prehistoric cultures of Guyana, established the first formal, national school of art, and contributed tirelessly to the role of art in the project of nation-building until his death in 1998.
Not least, what Evelyn Williams shows, through access to her father’s letters and papers, is that Denis Williams used art and its formal demands to think deeply about the issues of race and identity, about the national and the international and the relationship between the individual artist and the dominant trends of his time. With over sixty colour illustrations and many more in black and white, along with a detailed chronology and bibliography, The Art of Denis Williams presents a rich and rewarding portrait of an artist whose vision continues to demand attention.
Evelyn A. Williams is a researcher, painter and writer born in London and trained at Stoke-on-Trent College of Art. She currently lives in Fife, though she has lived in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and has studios both in Scotland and Guyana.
