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When surreal becomes real

Painting: A portrait of computer game animator James Harman, called. "The Man With a Horn," a primitive surreal spirit portrait.

Everyone wonders what the artist’s life is like.

Williams: I love to get up early, roam around my yard with a cup of coffee, inspecting the flower gardens, and then ease myself into the studio.

I look at the 20 or so pictures in various states of completion and just start in where I feel like it.

My heart is only in the creative work; nothing else can really hold my attention.

So you work on more than one painting at a time?

Williams: I work in thematic series. One series of acrylic on paper I call "Women Holding (symbolically laden) Objects," multicultural women, looking thoughtful and deeply reverent, holding things such as a huge red paleolithic shell, a tiny black horse, a toy sailboat, a golden cup containing a farmscape, or an enormous flower.

Another series I call "Occupations" also has the feeling of reverence for life. These, smaller and on plywood, depict heads of women and men with their eyes closed in different scenes: The Environmentalist, a soft dreamy African man in an African landscape; The Navigator, an intense and wise white woman with a rough night sea behind her; and the Scholar, a white woman with short cropped hair and a bemused look on her face, eyes closed as if she is seeing something extremely interesting in her mind, and she has three halos that seem to be moving up and down from over her head to around her neck.

Do you worry about running out of ideas?

Williams: I return to these themes and they evolve into new themes. One idea leads to another, and I never run out of ideas, just time to get to work on them.

I allow myself to paint anyway I want, so some are looser, some are tighter. I work in acrylic, gouache, tempera, on paper, wood, canvas, collage, clay, styrofoam or whatever!

Does painting enable you to tap into something interior?

Williams: I call my style Primitive Surreal. I have depth and modeling in my paintings of images that come from my mind. I delight myself with what I come up with.

The stories I have to tell I never knew I had to tell until they came out in paintings.

My images are iconic, symbolic, tender in their honesty and revelation of personal truths or observances of human nature and of our tenuous/ecstatic existence.

Did you grow up in an artistic family?

Williams: My childhood, growing up on a poor dairy farm in central Massachusetts with two parents who were both incredibly inventive, creative, stubborn, Yankee individuals, was a great influence on the way I think, look at life and solve problems.

I feel like I am a self-taught artist even though I attended art school and have a B.F.A. degree from UCSC.

I always went my own way and had to rediscover and reinvent everything for myself.

How did you support yourself before you started selling?

Williams: I augmented my painting sales with teaching a variety of interesting workshops at the Art League.

In my newly favorite class, Process Painting, we throw out the book on what makes good art and just paint from the depths of our soul for the pure joy of it.

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