October meeting

About fifty people were present on 17th October to listen to Paul Williams tell us about his career and work. It was so popular that we nearly ran out of chairs. And it was well worth the squeeze. Paul had been good at drawing when he did A-level Art, but had not gone further at university. Instead he went into psychology. We were impressed by his youthful pen and watercolour sketches made while travelling around, a sure sign of greater things to come. He took up painting properly only a few years ago. Starting with a box of oil paints containing a full range of colours, he initially felt he had to use all the colours. So his early paintings were multicoloured, but by no means insignificant. Many of us envied his sense of composition and perspective. A self portrait, harbour scenes, boats; he can tackle anything! The last part of the talk was about his more recent work. What an interesting technique. Intriguing mixtures of different media. Lots of diluted oil glazes, overlaid on heavily drawn charcoal, dragged, some chalk, paint trickled rather then painted. It gave us lots of ideas. His coastal scenes with jagged rocks, twisted strata, smooth boulders and pebbles, violent waves or foaming water's edge, rock pools, seaweed. Everything was meticulously portrayed, giving much to delight the eye in close-up as well as from a distance. Although seemingly as realistic as a photo, Paul's paintings have a slightly surreal feeling produced by his light effects and his choice of colour (now reduced to a much more limited palette). The evening passed very quickly.