[an error occurred while processing this directive] People, Undergraduate, Department of Art, University of Delaware [an error occurred while processing this directive]

FACULTY:

Faculty

Peter Williams

Professor
peterw@udel.edu
www.paulkotula.com/artists/williams/index.html
108 Taylor Hall
Office Hours:
302.831.1196

M.F.A., Maryland Institute College of Art

B.F.A., Minneapolis College of Art and Design

My working career spans more than forty years and stretches back to the hometown high school experience, a great art teacher Joe McDowell and a supportive mother and family. My process has always been experimental with regard to content and traditional form.  I seem to love color and am currently in a rather strong comical phase, the color, its details are important to the structure or form of this work for me.

So my early instincts were to berate skill only to see it as a necessity and its ability to become poetic, I saw this skillful mechanism open up solutions, such as creating and moving form or space or finding either side of an edge. I found conceptual solutions in resolving the developmental problems. However it seemed my work has always wanted to quote any one moment I had experienced during the day so content began to slip in and with that form.

I have been in Delaware for ten years, nothing seems to happen of much consequence. So necessity is the mother of invention. I create a stable of characters and they introduce me to moments in the work and sometimes that moment creates different visual and narrative paths for me to follow. In those moments of formal  contradiction; discordant color, complicated compositions, Invention takes place for me.

The work is consequential of my own inner attempt to experience the outer world. Things occur in a non – linear format. The making of a painting is lousy with traps and detours and its difficult to control all of them, so you try to construct a sensibility with its own language; color, shape, line, volume, weight, Race card … etc

While color is an important indicator for me, emotive, or discordant, the color I find regulates the emotional depth [in the color]. In earlier moments in my works. I had to tone down color to find a way into a complex narrative. What was sign or symbol , I could only guest at. As I come to understand the narrative the most challenging part of making a painting for me is in painting the form.

My career has been full of a variety of directions that proved to be of interest. The most cohesive part of this journey has been work about the life of African American  as subject.  In college I made images of black cowboys , while living in New Mexico. Now I find the subject my negrotude reasserting itself and is still a powerful device to try to express and expose to an audience.

I am also an amputee, car accident in college. This experience has always influenced my interest in the figure and the use of narrative space in my story telling. There is an immediacy I am constantly thinking about, through the use of color.

Articles about Professor Williams:

http://www.thedetroiter.com/APR03/Williams.html
http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2005/dec/artgrant121504.html
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=6487
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=9119

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