{"id":219911,"date":"2025-06-28T00:07:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T00:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/219911\/"},"modified":"2025-06-28T00:07:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T00:07:17","slug":"artists-feel-for-colour-camden-new-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/219911\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist\u2019s feel for colour | Camden New Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aubrey Williams, circa 1961, in his studio at Greencroft Gardens (detail). [Courtesy Estate of Aubrey Williams]<\/strong><\/p>\n

TODAY considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Aubrey Williams always thought outside the box and defied easy categorisation. The results are the startling canvasses currently on show at the October Gallery, hard to fathom but holding your gaze with their drama and colour.<\/p>\n

Aptly titled Elemental Force, it is Williams\u2019 eighth solo exhibition at the Bloomsbury-based gallery, whose championship of his work over the past four decades has helped see his star dramatically rise in recent years, with a show last year at Tate Britain.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years, Aubrey\u2019s work wasn\u2019t recognised properly and it is only now people are realising how stunning an artist he was,\u201d said the October\u2019s director Chili Hawes.<\/p>\n

On display are a variety of pieces from the 1950s through to the 1980s, including work that has never been seen before, paintings that are now considered ahead of their time in their abstract depiction of Williams\u2019 piercing \u201ccosmosvision\u201d.<\/p>\n

He arrived in the UK from Guyana in 1952 aged 26 to become a professional artist, developing a highly distinctive practice that drew chiefly on his passion for pre-Columbian art but also American abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky, and the music of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich.<\/p>\n

A prolific painter, he worked out of studios at his home in Greencroft Gardens, West Hampstead, where he lived with his wife and daughter, and also frequently undertook artistic expeditions to Guyana, Jamaica and the US. But in England he came up against an antipathy towards abstract art and art considered to be outside the Western canon and, after moderate success in the 1950s and 1960s with a number of small exhibitions, struggled to find a larger platform. To help pay the bills, he taught at Exeter University and the Camden Arts Centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe situation is England was dire \u2013 there was so much prejudice against work that wasn\u2019t European,\u201d said Hawes, who co-founded the October Gallery in 1979 to breech such cultural insularity. \u201cThere was just the Commonwealth Institute and Africa Centre. People came to us because there was nowhere else to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Williams\u2019 death from cancer in 1990 his work faded from view. \u201cWe formed a committee to discuss how we can progress Aubrey\u2019s work so that it gets greater public attention,\u201d added Hawes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw that he was really a great artist and we needed to do everything we could to get him more exposure. We banged on a lot of doors and pushed for Tate Britain to take a look at his work. In the end [in 2023-2024], it dedicated a whole room to him in recognition of his contribution to 20th century British art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Aubrey Williams: Quartet No 5, Opus 92 (Shostakovich Series), 1981 oil on canvas,132 x 208cm. \u00a9 Estate of Aubrey Williams. Courtesy the Estate of Aubrey Williams and October Gallery. [\u00a9Jonathan Greet]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Williams was born into a middle-class family in Georgetown and proved artistically gifted early on, joining the pioneering Working People\u2019s Art Class at the age of 12. However, at his father\u2019s behest, he trained as an agronomist, becoming an official responsible for increasing sugar production. But his efforts to improve the lot of sugar cane workers instead led to him being effectively banished to the remote north-west, Guyana\u2019s equivalent to Siberia, to work with the Warrau, one of the Amerindian tribes that populate the country\u2019s vast Amazonian interior.<\/p>\n

In Imruh Bakari\u2019s fascinating 1987 documentary, Mark of the Hand, which is to be shown as part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition, Williams reveals that it was his accidental encounter with the Warrau, their artefacts and rituals, that would prove life-changing, saying, \u201cIn a sense, I didn\u2019t really discover art until I got to know the Warrau Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thereafter, much of his work came to incorporate pre-Columbian iconography that he came across during his two years in the bush, to express not only his profound reverence for nature but his fears about its destruction, using the spectacular collapse of the Mayan civilisation \u2013 as alluded to in his painting Time and the Elements (Olmec-Maya and now) \u2013 to show what happens when technology gets ahead of itself and destroys the environment that gave rise to it. \u201cWe are doing the same thing today. We are fast running behind our technology,\u201d he said, long before the word \u201cecocide\u201d had entered public consciousness.<\/p>\n

In the film, which was shot in Guyana, we see him lovingly restoring the totemic murals he painted at the former Timehri International Airport in 1970 on behalf of the government which, on paper at least, also considered Amerindian culture an important part of the national story. \u201cTimehri\u201d means \u201cmark of the hand\u201d in Arawak \u2013 in other words, \u201cart\u201d \u2013 and forms the title of several of his works.<\/p>\n

Later, in an emotional return to the Warrau village he once stayed in, and surrounded by jungle foliage, he talks of his love of Shostakovich, which produced a series of related paintings, among them the thrilling Quartet No 5, Opus 92: \u201cThe first time I heard his first symphony I was in my early teens and this music hit me, it hit me really hard because I was hearing for the first time a total sound of music that had rather profound visual connotations. I could feel colour.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Williams, the cosmos has no borders or distinctions and, by the same token, neither has art.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Aubrey Williams: Elemental Force at October Gallery, Old Gloucester Street, WC1N 3AL, runs until July 26, Tues-Sat, free. The screening of Mark of the Hand takes place at 6.30pm, Wed, July 2 (free but booking required) octobergallery.co.uk\/events\/<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aubrey Williams, circa 1961, in his studio at Greencroft Gardens (detail). [Courtesy Estate of Aubrey Williams] TODAY considered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[86775,2606,748,393,4884,257,18394,18395,16,15,18396],"class_list":{"0":"post-219911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-angela-cobbinah","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-london","14":"tag-the-camden-new-journal","15":"tag-the-islington-tribune","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-west-end-extra"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114758081071614451","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}