Charles Williams NEAC

Artist Bio

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Williams is a British artist. 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. While most of his career has been directly involved in the art world, painting and exhibiting in London, the UK and the wider world, he has also had a career in teaching visual art in Higher Education, at levels from Master’s degree to Foundation diploma.  

Formerly Programme Director of Fine Art at Canterbury Christ Church University, he was a PhD scholar there between 2018 and 2021, completing an auto-ethnographic investigation into his painting in 2023. In 2022 he was elected President of the Royal Watercolour Society.

Exhibitions include RA Summer Exhibition, Hunting Prize, Lynn Painter Stainers, Threadneedle Prize, The Marmite Prize, and the John Moore’s. Galleries include Lily Zeligmann Gallery in the Netherlands, John Martin of London, Charlie Dutton Gallery, and solo shows at, among others, the Bakersfield Museum of Modern Art, Cal., USA. He is currently represented by New Arts Projects in London. He published ‘Basic Drawing: How To Draw What You See’ in September 2011 and the follow-up, ‘Basic Watercolour’ in July 2014 (Robert Hale, London).  He has written a series of articles for Turps magazine on Carracci, GD Tiepolo, Joseph Highmore and humour in painting. His interests are in the figurative, narrative tradition, although the work is informed by a fascination with formal elements of 2D and 3D design. 

Artist Statement

Williams is a painter who also writes. In his work, the possibility of presence in the two-dimensional arena of painting wrestles with scale and material. Narrative, surface, and image are knitted together in an unfolding improvisation, taking in his 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. Recent work has taken him into the world of therianthropy. He works alone in his studio, but sometimes in collaboration with self-styled con-artist Dan Devlin, who published Talking to Louise Bourgeois with www.susakpress.com. They worked together on The Lost Paintings Of Herzog Dellafiore, also available on www.susakpress.com.

‘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 swill around 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.’

April 2022