Guy Brett, 'A Tragic Excitement'
In: Aubrey Williams. Edited by Andrew Dempsey, Gilane Tawadros and Maridowa Williams. London: Institute of International Visual Arts in association with the Whitechapel Gallery, 1998, pp. 22-35.
The subtlety of the matter - the complexity of the history that has yet to be written - is that Aubrey Williams' work would have to be considered in three different contexts: that of Guyana, that of the Guyanese and West Indian 'diaspora' in Britain, and that of British society. These contexts would have to be considered to a degree separately, and in their complicated inter-relationships, affected by the realities of power. And all would have to be adjusted in relation to Williams' own desire to be simply a modern, contemporary artists, the equal of any other. This was the context in which he saw himself. At one moment he could say: "I haven't wasted a lot of energy on this roots business ... I've paid attention to a hundred different things ... why must I isolate one philosophy?"; at another: "the crux of the matter inherent in my work since I was a boy has been the human predicament, specifically with regard to the Guyanese situation."
A further gloss on these complexities is given by the fact that Williams' painting fluctuates between representational references and abstraction. We cannot be so simplistic as to identify Williams' pre-Columbian motifs solely with the 'local' and his abstraction solely with the 'universal'.
[...]
On an external level one can point to several intriguing connections between Williams' work and that of, for example, Peter Lanyon and Alan Davie. These go beyond the obvious fact that they all practised a type of large-scale gestural painting, and in Williams' and Davie's case were drawn to symbolic forms. All three had a connection with music. Davie is a jazz enthusiast and even played in a jazz orchestra in his early years. Jazz improvisation was cited in CAM meetings as an analogy for Caribbean literary and artistic creation. Williams spent ten years painting a series inspired by Shostakovich's music. He also played the violin and sang - as did his paternal grandfather, the dominant influence in his childhood. Lanyon, too, came from a musical family (his father was a composer and pianist as well as an amateur photographer). All three artists had an emotional-spiritual affinity with flight. Davie and Lanyon were both gliding enthusiasts (Lanyon died in a gliding accident), and both identified with birds ("How much more important than Art, just to be a bird" - Davie [23]; "[my pictures] are concerned with birds describing the invisible, their flight across cliff faces and their soaring activity" - Lanyon [24]). Throughout his career, Williams added to a series of 'bird-portraits'. Furthermore, all three identified strongly with an ancient cultural or environmental heritage: Davie has claimed that the roots of symbolism are "in my Celtic heritage" [25] (he was born at Grangemouth, Scotland, in 1920), Lanyon stressed an ancestral link with the Cornish landscape, and pre-Columbian culture was Williams' life-long preoccupation.
Of course these common enthusiasms can be related to desires which inspired the kind of painting all three artists produced: spontaneous improvisation, freeing oneself in the act of painting, tapping the unconscious, etc. But the ways in which this phenomenon is 'all of a piece' only sensitises one all the more to differences. One has a certain feeling at an intuitive level that the British artists' notion of freedom entailed an escape from self-control, whereas, for Williams, with his equal and opposite attraction to artists like Orozco, Lam and Matta, the same freedom was associated with containing chaos.
[23] Alan Bowness, Alan Davie, (London: Lund Humphries, 1967), p. 19.
[24] Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon, (Henley-on-Thames, Oxon.: Aiden Ellis, 1971), p. 25.
[25] Alan Bowness, op. cit., p. 174.