past exhibitions
:
rez williams
Rez Williams:
Steel Walls and Waterlines
 November
13 - December 21, 1999
One may view some thing every day without a response. Then
one day, when looking at that same object or place, is confronted
with an emotional or spiritual reaction which sheds new
light on the mundane. One day Rez Williams was sailing in
the Vineyard Sound off Martha's Vineyard in his 17' sailboat
Zig Zag, when he surveyed the fishing vessels he saw every
day with new perspective. It was as if he had never truly
acknowledged their strength, meaning and character. Later
he would suggest that,
"beyond the forms of their brutal and powerful hulls and
the absolutely gorgeous and often jarring combinations of
their topside paint colors, these vessels represent the
culmination of years of design evolution. They embrace an
implicit acceptance and defiance of the everyday dangers
of working offshore in unpredictable conditions."
 To
paint the roughened integrity of such fishing vessels, Williams
sailed to New Bedford, Massachusetts to study one of the
busiest mainland fishing fleets. Sailing in and out of the
harbor, he took photographs and chronicled his voyages preparing
for work in the studio. A true working harbor, New Bedford
is not the place for casual sailors. The fishing vessels
and other boats are commercial, and pleasure boats are not
a welcome addition to the rugged scenery. Through his interactions
with the harbor, Williams learned that the New Bedford side
of the harbor was mostly Portuguese-American and that of
the Fairhaven side was Scandinavian-American. Each group's
trawlers are distinctive, reflecting cultural attitudes
toward fishing and the sea. Many were built in the 1980's
when legislation and tax laws made investments in new trawlers
lucrative.
 More
recently, however, depleted fish stocks have impacted the
New England fishing industry, which is under further pressure
from government legislation that has challenged methods
of fishing and regulated the quantities of catches. Though
not overtly political in nature, Williams's subject matter
is conceptually charged with a subtext of social gravity.
With these issues in mind, Williams presents these trawlers
in a new series of paintings, Steel Walls and Waterlines.
This large-scale body of work, which includes six-by-ten-foot
canvases, monumentalizes the subject with reverence and
an eye toward the unpredictable. The vibrantly colored and
distinctive paintings are portraits of working boats, icons
of the often-unromantic reality of the fishing industry.
These paintings also represent the painterly pursuits of
Williams, who utilizes a mixture of short, precise brush
strokes and wide, sweeping bands of color. This style enables
him to reach the essence of his subject matter while avoiding
the often-banal documentary nature of realist painting.
The paintings are expressionistic documents of a culture
and a way of life.
 It
is from the perspective of the water, as if in a boat, that
Williams presents these trawlers to the viewer. We see them
as the artist did at sea level, not from land or above.
From the angles stressed by his skillful manipulations of
the picture plane, scale is emphasized, while the character
of the trawlers is revealed through the physical condition
and tension between the stern and bow construction, as well
as the use of vibrant paint color. In many ways these paintings
bring to life the boats described in Sebastian Junger's
The Perfect Storm, which chronicled the plight of such vessels
during a terrible nor'easter off Georges Bank.
Even though Williams has consulted fishermen on the use
of rigging while dragging, reflecting his concern for painting
the vessels "anatomically correct[ly]," these works transcend
documentation to become portraits dominated by character,
nuance, narrative, culture and history. In discussing his
earlier landscapes Williams has proposed that, "A landscape
is generally just what nature gives you. I generally try
to twist nature and twist it violently. Itıs twisted because
of my interest in man-made objects." Williams chooses to
avoid the documentary nature of landscape painting, searching
for instances of intrusion on the land and water while applying
an expressionistic palette of often jarring juxtapositions
of color. In his newest series of paintings, similar to
earlier works, Williams reveals the different sides of his
sense of nature. Recently, he painted a landscape of a highway
wrapped around a cliff with a car speeding around a tight
bend. Unsatisfied with the composition because of its documentary
nature and near "perfect" scenery, he painted in another
vehicle smashed and wrecked at the bottom of the cliff.
In his paintings of trawlers one must also look beyond the
surface and subject matter for significant subtexts conveyed
through scale, tonal contrasts, color and background elements.
For example, the modern day dock life of the fishing industry
is depicted in the background of many paintings where we
find U-Haul trucks, pick-ups, random parked vehicles, armed
Coast Guard cruisers, fish factories, ice factories and
dilapidated warehouses. Often these structures and dock
traffic serve as a foil to the fishing vessels, emphasizing
the unromantic and rarely nostalgic life lead by these muscular
working boats.
 White
Boat at Sea documents the rigging of a trawler dragging
for fish with passionate honesty. The side rigging of the
boat alludes to its function to stabilize the boat in a
seaway and guide the net. Yet, it is the use of perspective
and the low horizon line which draws the viewer into the
painting and in turn creates the sense of imbalance and
power of the rolling seas. No matter how much steel is used
to construct these vessels there is little question that
the boats can be easily overwhelmed by nature. The White
Boat at Sea has what Williams describes as the "hot
rod" look. This aesthetic is also found in Lutador.
It offers the cleanest of lines: two racing stripes, a red
undercarriage and a snubnose cabin with sleek railing. The
sleekness is amplified by the beautifully abstracted, rudimentary
design of the commercial building, which frames the vessel
and accentuates the lines of the boat's 1950's roadster
quality. Again, the tipped angles and use of perspective
thrust Lutador forward on the picture plane giving
the structure integrity and confidence while stressing the
flatness of the picture plane.
Courageous, from Fairhaven, is another example of
one of Williams' s monumentalized vessels, but here we begin
to see what the artist has described as the "Jeckyl and
Hyde" of most trawlers. Painted in profile, the port side
reveals the powerful bow in stark contrast to the rough
and mysterious working area of the stern. Half of the canvas
is subsumed by water, forcing the trawler to be cropped
on two sides. The net and gears are shrouded in black tarpaulins
and the grittiness of the stern appears to be part of a
different vessel entirely. In this painting we see the structure
of a monumentalized portrait of a boat, which is then undermined
by the artist's willingness to reveal the vessel's dueling
identities and spatial relationships. The portrait is conceived
in three sections: the top left, the crew's quarters, the
working area at the top right, and the ocean at the lowest
section of the painting. These three areas represent life
on a trawler. The working area, where the money is made,
does not express a desire to keep up appearances and we
sense that it is an area under constant stress. In contrast,
the steel walls separate the living section or cocoon from
the working area. It is a sanctuary of sorts above the sway
of the ocean and is the only place to be relieved from the
exhausting labor. The 5/8 inch steel walls of the hull and
cabin define the space and are the only barrier the crew
has from the treacherous elements. Williams has also suggested
that the flatness and one-dimensionality of the sky and
water at sea are mirrored in the one-dimensional steel walls
of these boats. In this painting the constricting flatness
of the vessel's walls, as experienced on-board at sea, are
complemented by the acceptance of the flatness of the picture
plane, which reflects the one-dimensional and solitary reality
of living and working on a trawler.
As the twentieth century comes to an end, and abstract art
has been eclipsed by representational art, and the hybridity
of postmodernism has been accepted, Rez Williams has reconciled
disparate painting traditions of American art once thought
to be irreconcilable: regionalism and abstract expressionism.
In many of the paintings, including both versions of Iberia
II, the water and sky dominate the presence of the trawlers.
For the crews of these boats, who may spend weeks at sea,
the water and sky are more familiar to them than docks and
people. Williams contrasts dock life with life at sea in
the paintings. By stressing nature's scale over manıs intrusion
within the waterscape, the paintings impress upon the viewer
how much nature dominates the life of a fishing vessel.
Sky and water are also vehicles for Williams' colorful expressionistic
palette. The application of paint, most prevalently in the
sky and water, bears a resemblance to the expressionistic
gesture of Franz Kline's broad stroked abstract work. The
fishing vessels, buildings and cars recall the realist/mannerist
touch of Thomas Hart Benton's regionalism. These "full blooded"
pictorial gestures and measured respect for the subject
also reveal the artist's admiration for Lucian Freud. Yet
Williams goes far beyond these artistic influences to create
works which are aesthetically distinct. His choice of theoretically
charged subject and study of the human imprint on the land/waterscape
further characterizes the artist's intimate relation to
his subject matter. In describing his perspective Williams
has written of these trawlers,
"The title of the exhibition Steel Walls and Waterlines
attempts to convey the poignancy of a life where men go
offshore, cocooned within slabsided steel vessels. This
is a world of mind-numbing work relieved by periods of anesthetizing
boredom. There are poetic resonances in the chance encounter
of cold welded steel plate and the swelling grey expanse
of salt ocean. The bow cleaves the sea, propelled by reciprocating
cylinders; water closes in behind the stern, silently erasing
all traces of passage. The vessel's painted waterline underscores
the mystery of this uneasy relationship. Studying these
scenarios in the mind's eye, while the boats lie idle at
their slips, is what these paintings are about."
In his series, Steel Walls and Waterlines, Williams brings
the monumentality of fishing culture to the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Portland. As viewers, we are provided
dramatic access to the life of such boats and an almost
dizzying perspective of swelling waters. Combining his painterly
styles and interest in the human presence and impact on
the landscape, this series confirms Williams's independent
spirit and constant need to challenge himself and the viewer.
Mark H.C. Bessire ICA Director
|