nourishing obscurity

Evelyn Williams 1929 – 2012

As my life becomes less eventful, so my dreams are filled with happenings. Nightly I am transported into situations where I am among friends, strangers and surprised lovers. I suffer nightmares and enjoy levels of serenity and sensations of happiness unknown in waking hours.

Now I wait impatiently for the time to sleep, hoping that this busy night life could be a foretaste of what’s to come – not oblivion, more a permanent state of extraordinary exaltation, experiencing dramatic situations that in waking hours I have not the imagination to dream of. A brand new life, to replace the old. So the image of the sleeping woman is in my mind.

Not so much forgotten more like completely ignored by the controllers of State Approved Art, the only art we are allowed to know about.

She received obituaries in our ‘quality’ broadsheet newspapers but it is likely that this was her first ever mention and will be her last. Forgotten and ignored like so many excellent artists who are anathema to the establishment who would rather fawn over grinning showbiz buffoons who produce tacky and garish paintings – yes I am looking at you JakeThePeg!

I was also unaware of her until I saw the current issue of The Jackdaw the only art magazine/newspaper worth buying.

Editor David Lee doesn’t hold back in his article on Williams -

“In the Tate collection which stores 274 works by Andy Warhol no space can be found for a single piece by Evelyn Williams, who is a far more interesting artist… …in the last two years alone, when 516 works were acquired by the Tate, there was no room for a single one by this important woman artist.”

“Why is it that so much about today’s Tate stinks?”

We used to laugh at how the Soviet Union would only allow art depicting the Heroes of the Revolution etc. but is our current British art production any more enlightened or free?

One thing is certain, those old Soviet era artists were technically proficient and a lot better than any of the graduates from British art schools and colleges during the last forty or fifty years.

This is worth reading in full -

We live in dangerous and vulgar times when, as the poet and painter William Blake wrote of his own industrially-shattered age, ‘commerce hangs on every tree’.

Filed under: Art, JD, Society & human issues