On the Monhegan paintings

In Views From Another Island, Williams returns to landscape painting with sixteen oil-on-canvas works. The subject is the rugged shoreline and coastal forest of Monhegan Island, Maine. This follows a series of Irish paintings of coastal and rural Mayo during his fellowship at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in 2014, which the artist says was pivotal in kindling a renewed interest in landscape. 

Williams challenged himself with how to deal with what initially presented itself as ‘a chaotic jumble of dead and living understory, distant glimpses of ocean, and towering deciduous canopy where vegetative undergrowth comes slam bam up to the edge of the sea with no mediating interval.’

As the series developed, the descriptive reference of place fell away and transitioned into more self-referential statements. The artist brings magnificence to this primal scenery by arranging the material into abstract elements, simplified by a fairly limited palette. His fondness for northern European colors – such as Prussian blue, green and indigo, combined with bismuth yellow, Venetian red and Mars red – is evident. He conveys the limpid sense of northern sky, which has a milky quality due to its distance offshore, with titanium white.

Williams is well known for painting the brightly colored, steel-hulled fishing vessels of New Bedford, where he has for years explored the abstract elements of a local industrial subject. ‘The elements of sky and water in these paintings were structured to work with the dominant form of the vessels, and so took on both a subordinate and abstract function’ he says. ‘In the Irish landscapes, this hierarchy and crutch were gone. There was no tyranny of the image; the composition was now democratic, and this has become almost socialistic in the Monhegan paintings.’

– Tanya Augoustinos, A Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard