Born in Evanston, Illinois, Williams is a British artist who lives in semi-reclusion in a small town in rural Kent. A former student at the Royal Academy Schools, and a founder member of the notorious Stuckist art movement, his work has been exhibited in...
Read MoreBorn in Evanston, Illinois, Williams is a British artist who lives in semi-reclusion in a small town in rural Kent. A former student at the Royal Academy Schools, and a founder member of the notorious Stuckist art movement, his work has been exhibited in the UK, Europe, and the United States. A retreat into academia at the beginning of this century has been followed by his current project, an auto-ethnological PhD examining his own studio practice.
Charles Williams is a painter who writes. In his work, narrative and image are knitted together in an unfolding improvisation, taking in Charles’ hapless attempts to thrive in the Art World, from being a West End Gallery Artist to teaching art in care homes and being Louise Bourgeois’ most inept studio assistant, incontinent Basset Hounds, the real and imaginary artist Alex Koolman and the group of friends whose lives circle the great and now forgotten writer Erica Kendall, author of the counter-factual history of the Warsaw Pact Free Republic of Great Britain Long Live The Chairman! (Faber, 1961).
My work is a dialogue between me in my studio and paintings that seem to gain holds on me – Joseph Highmore’s Mr Oldham And His Guests, Annibale Carracci’s The Butcher’s Shop, Daniel Stringer’s 1776 self-portrait for example – and stories and ideas that go round and round in my imagination and memory. 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 in the murk, and that seems an apt analogy to my painting process.
