Tuesday, September 02, 2025

KENT WILLIAMS RELINQUISHES CONTROL


You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out,
You put your left foot in, and you shake it all about.

                                                        --- The Hokey Pokey 

Many contemporary artists seem to have have concluded that accuracy and realism are no longer sufficient, so they start a picture in a careful, realistic style then rough it up with an element of wildness-- a spill, a splatter, a deconstruction, a crude gesture.

Here, for example, the talented Jack Unruh proves that he can master fine detailed pen work but then offsets it with a loosely applied thick, wet black brush:


Next, the talented Joe Ciardiello draws with a sensitive, delicate line, but comes back with spatters of fluorescent paint and a primitive black brush that runs dry halfway through its mission:


Each in their own distinctive way, artists seem to feel that a picture benefits from the open clash of two opposite extremes.  They first demonstrate their great control of technical skills (as if to prove their credentials) then balance it with with pagan elements (as if to avoid the shame of appearing too civilized).  When done well, this increases the range of the drawing.

Andrew Wyeth, after slaving away on a very precise, careful painting, looked at it in despair and decided the only way he could cure it was to risk everything by throwing a cup of paint right in the middle of the picture. Then he quickly left the room before he lost his nerve and attempted to re-assert control. 

One of my favorite artists who pairs control with lack of control is Kent Williams:

Note how the fine line, detailed realism of this bird is enhanced by a messy ochre stain:



It contributes freedom and a casual looseness to what otherwise might be a too tight drawing.  It improves the composition and design, expands the range and contributes a more organic, natural feel to the work. 

Here is another example of an accomplished drawing where Williams gambled with an out-of-control spill and ended up improving it beyond what tight drawing might have accomplished:

 

After paying the terrible dues necessary to learn how to draw with control, how much of that control are we willing to surrender?  That is the question:


2 comments:

Richard said...

I believe these seemingly haphazard flourishes evolved as a device meant to conceal effort, nothing more. They are the art that conceals the art from the layman; in Italian, they are means to sprezzatura. The audience cannot tell the difference between a picture truly drawn or painted effortlessly and one executed painstakingly but merely finished with a layer of scribble, noise, and grit.

Compare Sargent to his contemporaries among the French academics. Both labored over their paintings for ages, carefully modeling form with a tiny brush. But in the end, Sargent covered his tracks with a handful of cleverly placed thick strokes (usually toward the edge of the canvas, and never on the face or hands).

Thus he managed to escape the criticisms laid against the academics of being insufficiently spontaneous, overworked, and so on, even though his working method was largely indistinguishable from theirs apart from this final flourishing pass.

Kent Williams appears to be using it the same way. He is an ARC Atelier painter who hides his stodgy atelier training beneath some meaningless abstract-expressionist marks at the end, after he has already rendered his reference into the canvas.

Truly loose gestural art is a beautiful thing. But lay audiences are much more likely to be impressed by careful work that merely implies gesture.

David Apatoff said...

Richard-- Concealing effort is a goal of the greatest artists; it's why Michelangelo burned his preliminary drawings showing all the heavy lifting and manual labor that went into his masterpieces, and as you note, Sargent tried to create an air of spontaneity too, so I don't see why you demean such efforts as "nothing more." As William Butler Yeats wrote about concealing the hard work of poetry:

'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

If you think that Williams was using a "final flourishing pass" the same way Sargent did (which I'm not sure is correct) I'd have no problem with that, and I don't understand why you would either.

In the interests of accuracy, you are mistaken about Williams' background. He attended Pratt, NOT an ARC Atelier. Upon graduation he immediately jumped into the fast moving deadline-driven world of comics and graphic novels where he was innovative and quite successful-- the opposite of "stodgy atelier training." (https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2007/03/kent-williams.html ) He also taught art at Pratt and a number of other art schools and matured into illustration and fine art.

Most importantly, I don't think any of these artists (Unruh, Ciardiello, Wyeth and especially Williams) are sprinkling spontaneity at the end for purely cosmetic reasons. The risks they took are too great. Wyeth could easily have ruined that painting by throwing a cup of paint on it, just as Williams could easily have ruined all his hard work on that first or second drawing if fate and hydrology had taken a slightly different bounce. He was prepared for the sacrifice.

I think these artists are struggling with genuine conflicts between realism, abstraction, neo-expressionism, conceptual art and other influences in an era of great flux. My hat is off to them for their effort.