Franklin Williams. Desire and Obsession

About

The large selection of work on view is striking given the complexity and palpable focus in each canvas. Mining a rich cache of personal and cultural history, the subject matter ranges from mysterious portraits to archeological vessels and Raggedy Anne dolls. Williams’s childhood remains a potent source of inspiration for his work: raised in a family of craftspeople, he learned to sew from an early age and witnessed the creation of handmade quilts, handkerchiefs, and placemats that filled his home. The practice of sewing has been consistent in Williams’s work, at times featuring canvas stitching as orderly as a tailor’s while in other moments allowing untrimmed threads to splay out like the fibers of a shag carpet. Occasionally the stitching surprises, weaving a doily, handkerchief, or element of collage into the picture plane as confidently as any area of paint.

In this spirit, a wide variety of mark making reveals an intuitive and athletic sense of play in the paintings’ construction. Forms are scaled up, down, spun around, and repositioned. Lyrical shapes echoing microorganisms and floral blooms  comingle with complex geometries and hints of representation. Delighting in the eroticism of the human form, ancient crafts, and childhood memories, Williams’s works are both intensely singular and universal in their scope. This is art made with an unmistakable joy, with an unrelenting fervor for living and making that has only been strengthened by time.

While Williams was still a student, the critic John Coplans gave the young artist a vote of confidence that helped set the course of his career. When Coplans saw Williams’s strange, intensely patterned drawings, he remarked, “this is who you are.” (The episode culminated in the pair launching Williams’s early forays into Abstract Expressionism off the San Francisco Bay Bridge.) Just a few years after Coplans’s pivotal input, Williams was included in Peter Selz’s landmark 1967 exhibition, Funk, at the University Art Museum at University of California, Berkeley. However, in line with Coplans’s imperative, Williams has consciously and persistently maintained his distance from any group identification or categorization. Perhaps due to this steadfast idiosyncrasy and commitment to the studio as a sacred place, his intricate, vibrant work has sustained a unique resonance throughout the decades.