Images of Oak Park to Meadow View a solo show by Sean Williams
CV
Location
Sean was born in North Wales in 1966, but after his education he stayed in Sheffield and is based at Block Studios.
Education
He studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and in 2022, Sean graduated with a Master of Visual Arts from Griffith University.
Curation
‘Urbia’ at the University of Sheffield Library Gallery in October 2006.
‘Drawn’ at Sheffield Clocktower Gallery in July 2010.
‘Hydro Power’ at Sheffield Clocktower in August 2011.
‘Pure Joy (Wins Again)’, at The Coterie Gallery in High Green located in Sheffield in June 2012.
Solo shows
Sean’s painting practise has concentrated on making a new body of work consisting of ten paintings:
Chigwell School in London which ran from October 2011 to January 2012.
Junction Arts Centre in Goole in August 2012.
Embassy Theatre in Skegness in the Summer of 2013. In July 2014, Sean had another solo show at the
Space2 Gallery in Watford in July 2014.
‘Oak Park to Meadow View’ at Cupola Gallery in February 2024.
Group shows
‘Helter Skelter’ with Edwin Aitken at Harrow Arts Centre in January 2014.
‘No-one Is Quite Sure’ in the ‘Contemporary British Painting’ show at Huddersfield Art Gallery in September 2014.
‘Guaranteed Pleasure’ in the ‘@PaintBritain’ show at Ipswich Art School in October 2014.
‘How Can This Survive’ in ‘Picturing Sheffield’ at the Millennium Galleries in November 2014.
‘Mountain Size’ at Pineapple Black located in Middlesbrough in November 2019.
‘Made in Britain’ at the National Museum of Poland in Gdańsk.
‘Contemporary Masters from Britain’ at Tianjin Academy of Fine Art in China.
‘Thirty Four Painters’ at Norwich Cathedral.
‘Our Bloody Hell’ is on show at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.
‘Beyond Other Horizons’ at Isi Palace of Culture in Romania in March 2020.
Awards
Shortlisted for the Marmite Painting Prize in 2011.
Shortlisted for the Woolgather Art Prize in 2013.
Shortlisted for the Neo: Art Prize in 2013.
Shortlisted for the John Ruskin Prize in July 2014.
Sean won the Emerging Artist award at SWELL in 2017.
Sean has gone on to receive grants for professional development from Arts Queensland and the Regional Art Development Fund through Ipswich City Council.
Sean Williams
Painter
“Over the last few years, I have produced a collection of paintings based on a walk around a fictional English town. The walk takes place on the edges of the town, highlighting the places that, while containing both urban and rural elements, are neither quite one thing nor the other. There are signs of life, of building work and farm animals, but no people. It includes views of parks, those essential oases of relative calm within the bustling conurbation, and farms – buildings which mark where the town ends and the countryside begins. There are also views of the curiously manufactured, artificial terrain of golf courses. The walk occurs across the year, encompassing all weathers. The urban and suburban views witnessed on the walk, force an exploration of the wide variety of places where we choose to live.
My paintings are views of the fringes of suburbia, places that feel as though they are familiar, but then escape our conditioned response. I aim to place the viewer as ‘still points of a turning world’ - alone, for a while, then possibly watched as they look on. The scene switches between mundane - what is evident and what impacts on our environment, and how we barely see it -and suggesting something may be about to happen. The paintings themselves are a painstaking mediation on the subject, constructed by thousands of tiny dots of paint. The intention of this adapted pointillist technique is to create a surface that shimmers ever so slightly. It also allows me to introduce a wide array of colours, mirroring the manner of Seurat. From a distance, these paintings can be relatively photo-realistic, but with closer inspection; they reveal themselves to be made up of these increasingly looser brush-marks and daubs with subtle shifts in colour. Painting in such a way is the only form of communication that enables me to most accurately convey my doubt.”