Fanfare: Enid Williams
Fanfare is a celebration of Enid Williams’ paintings from 2024 and 2025, as well as a brief look at the evolution of her work over the last 10 years. A fanfare in music is a quick flourish and Williams’ paintings do have all the color and joy expected in a flourish. They invite a rush of pleasure but also encourage careful, slow appreciation. She states, “My work is informed by a long standing interest in the use of elliptical and semi-circular shapes; an intersection of color shift and linear repetition. Within this framework, notable changes in format and scale have recently culminated in more expansive and energized imagery. While using a limited process, I extract a wide range of possibilities, including variation in spatial complexity and optical occurrence. Preserving a fluid paint quality that increases the speed and scale of my mark is also carefully considered as a way to reveal initial layering and a mostly visible record of my approach. The result is an interplay between larger and smaller elements and between simpler and more complex passages, providing a window back into the work’s progression.”
Enid, through exploration across more than two decades, has built a vocabulary of elliptical semicircular strokes. Her repetition of form gives her the freedom to construct a narrative using a finely tuned sense of color to make marks of almost unlimited variations of density. Her narrative is not bound by a traditional three-part outline but is a stop-action preservation of the rhythmic flow of her signature shape across time. Her paintings offer a contained, controlled, and satisfying experience of intentional mark making. Each form visually records the movement of her hand as each layer of marks records the evolution of the painting, culminating in a complex meditation on time and movement.
Enid Williams received her M.F.A. in painting from Kent State University and her B.A. in studio art from the University of Toledo. In 2011, Enid was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work is included in public and private collections including the Johnson Collection in South Carolina, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Contemporary Carolina Collection at the Medical University of South Carolina, and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. She has exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the State Museum of South Carolina, and the Greenville County Museum of Art, in South Carolina. She has taught design, drawing, painting, and printmaking at Kent State University, Youngstown State University, The University of Akron, and most recently at Greenville Technical College. After 10 years, she has recently retired from full-time teaching at Greenville Tech. She resides in Greenville, SC, and is represented by Hampton III Gallery in Taylors, SC. For more information, visit, www.enidwilliams.net.
Fanfare is on view August 25 through September 26 in Greenville Technical College’s Benson Campus Galleries, 2522 Locust Hill Road, Monday – Thursday, 9am – 7pm and Friday, 9am – 2pm. The public is welcome. Visit www.gvltec.edu/dva for more information or call Pat Owens, Gallery Assistant at 864 250-3051 or email Fleming Markel, Gallery Director at [email protected].
