fbpx
Menu
ART / PAINTING & ILLUSTRATION

Kent Williams’ Fantastical Fine Art

Like a strange love child between Egon Schiele and Salvador Dali, artist Kent Williams’ work has a style that is chaotically charged. Figurative by nature, and playing with the complicated relationship between representational and abstract, Williams’ work creates a world that is ambiguous and still familiar, “both real and unreal,” he says. The works are hypnotic expressions that could pass for strange surrealistic fantasies. His core strength that carries throughout all his works—whether graphic novel, oil painting or graphite drawing—is the delicate yet uncomfortable balance in playing with highly representational elements and abstracted aspects to find a tangible place for the human experience to live in and be absorbed perfectly. Though his work has evolved and morphed into different series and styles over the past 20+ years, Williams’ work has a very specific quality that is unmatched.

Williams has been an inker, a colorist and an illustrator for hundreds of comic books since the early 1980s, including Hellblazer, The Sandman, Akira, X-Men, Batman, Wolverine, Vertigo, and other Marvel and DC comic books. His comic creations are unique and expressive, and feels like fine at, regardless of the form it comes in. Some of his more notable graphic novels include the 2005 novel The Fountain with Darren Aronofsky, Blood: A Tale with J.M. DeMatteis and Tell Me, Dark from 1992 with Karl Edward Wagner and John Ney Rieber. The influence of the graphic style of his work onto his fine art has become more apparent in recent years, with his most recent works finding an interesting space between expression and representation.

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_002

Williams says he is fascinated by artists like Willem de Kooning and Gerhard Richter. de Kooning for his intelligence, depth and compositional sensibilities and Richter for his breadth of disparateness throughout his career. The visceral quality of his process is visible in each piece. Standing in front of one of Williams’ paintings, the viewer is transported to a seemingly real moment, inside the painting itself. The movement and significance of every brush stroke, every line, every dot or dollop of color, pushes and pulls the viewer to a place of understanding, of experience; the kind of quality you see when you are standing in front of a Van Gogh or a Mark Rothko.

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_003

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_001

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_004

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_006

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_007

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_008

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_009

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_010

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_011

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_012

kent_williams_beautifulbizarre_013

Kent Williams-River

About Author

Evan is the Editor-In-Chief of Inland Empire Weekly, Culture Magazine, Assistant Editor for YAY! LA Mag, and owns and operates the independent online art journal, Rogue Arts. She has an M.A. in Art History and is a Curator, Artist, Designer, Editor and Writer. She has contributed as an arts writer for KCET Artbound, OC Art Blog, OC Register, OCR Magazine, Artillery Magazine, Local Arts, Beauty & Wellness Magazine, Laika, Unite4:Good, and E-VOLVED Magazine. Past publications also include ArtScene, Juxtapoz, and Art Ltd.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE BEAUTIFUL BIZARRE EMAIL LIST


This site is protected by reCaptcha and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.


Beautiful Bizarre will never supply your information to anyone else without your explicit permission - see our PRIVACY POLICY.

Join the Beautiful Bizarre email list

 

This site is protected by reCaptcha and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.


Beautiful Bizarre Magazine takes your privacy seriously, we will
never share your information without your express permission.

718 Shares
Tweet
Pin718
Share
Share