Kelly Williams

Kelly Williams is an artist with a commitment to painting that stems from a deep, abiding love for trompe l'oeil, figurative realism, and genre painting. Working primarily in oil on canvas, Williams creates still life paintings rich in color, patt...

Kelly Williams is an artist with a commitment to painting that stems from a deep, abiding love for trompe l'oeil, figurative realism, and genre painting. Working primarily in oil on canvas, Williams creates still life paintings rich in color, pattern, and an embedded emotional heft. European vanitas painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is certainly reblooming in the still-life paintings Williams creates today. Grief for our lives lived pre-pandemic is tangible in the touch of paint to canvas. Objects as benign as bedsheets, tabletops, and tarot cards become signifiers of futility, doubt, and fear in her compositions--fear for days poorly spent, for ambiguous loss. William's work addresses questions of mimicry and representation not as a means of entertainment or ridicule, but as form of exaltation, of glorification. In her trompe l'oeil works, William's effort is not to deceive or trick the viewer, but to unify, to find comfort through our collective bolts of understanding what it is we are seeing and feeling.