SARAH WILLIAMS at the Galveston Arts Center

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SARAH WILLIAMS
opens october 8 at the Galveston Arts Center
by Todd Camplin

This Saturday, October 8th, artist Sarah Williams will be showing her paintings at the
Galveston Arts Center. I know what you're saying: "Galveston?!" But trust me, she is
worth the trip. No one captures a desolate, lonely, rural setting better than Williams.

Sarah Williams’ paintings are the cinematic equivalent of an establishing shot where some
kind of action is just about to occur. You can see and almost smell the tension in the air
around these works. I hear dramatic music in my head, as I expectantly wait for the next
dramatic moment. Being a painting, of course, that moment can never come, but the
feeling still remains.

These paintings depict vacant lots, gas stations, parking lots, and car washes illuminated
by unnatural lights: neon and fluorescent. The rest of the painting is bathed in the cold,
dark blackness of the night sky. This dark seems to seep into every crack of the buildings,
only held back temporarily by the ghostly glow of her lighting fixtures. “I paint
nightscapes of familiar yet isolated and unremarkable buildings, rooms and scenes
located in rural areas,” writes Williams. “The artistic language applied to slightly familiar
yet hauntingly isolated areas permits me to transform the common place and make the
insignificant, significant.” Even when Sarah paints a daytime landscape, the isolating
element is represented by snow. This blanket of white often traps rural dwellers. The
weather is the dramatic element and the farm houses and back streets seem to be
the only trace of human activity.

I love to learn about an artist’s process, and I have been lucky enough to talk to Williams
and see works in progress. Her paintings start out with a layer of orange on wood panel.
The photographic references are from her home town in Missouri and the surrounding areas.
She takes photographs of her familiar places with cheap disposable cameras to get the
strange plays of light. I would imagine she uses digital cameras as well. Once she has the
photo, she uses it as a reference to the painting and not an exact copy, like a photorealist
work. She edits the scene by pushing areas into the dark and punching up the illumination
of the lights.

Her recent shows at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas and McMurtrey Gallery in Houston had a
presence that overtook the gallery. Each painting is perfectly sized and seems to project its
own stories. The feeling of isolation was very strong. I hear she had a museum show at Albrecht-
Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, Missouri, and she was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize.
Make the drive to “Outside the County Seat,” at Galveston Arts Center and see Sarah
Williams’ paintings.

Highway 63, 2011, oil, 12"x24".

Pavement 1, 2011, oil, 12"x12"

Paris, 2011, oil, 24"x30".

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