Dale Williams

My art is a deliberate courting of the revelatory image - an approach I have practiced for many years. It is an effort to achieve a kind of imagery that has the potential to astound, as do figures of mythology and dreams; an imagery that is symbol of our shared reality, yet refracted through my personal experience - therefore both confession and revelation.

An incomplete account of my artistic development As an undergraduate I studied art at the Cooper Union in New York City, and for a brief time at California Institute of the Arts. I received a BFA degree from Cooper Union in 1977. In my second year at Cooper Union I devoted an entire semester to writing poetry even though I was enrolled in painting and sculpture classes. At that time I was also doing autobiographical performance art that occasionally incorporated my writing. The performance pieces showed the influence of the "actions" of the German artist Joseph Beuys, and a group of artists at the University of California, Davis, that included William Wiley. In my last two years as an undergraduate I concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. I also maintained more than a casual interest in writing. The most important artistic experience for me in those years was the exhibitions of Philip Guston's work at the David McKee Gallery. Guston's late work is now legendary, but at the time many of my teachers and a fair number of my fellow students couldn't accept it. Guston became a spiritual artistic mentor for me. Under influence of his late work I began keeping small sketchbooks in which I'd make drawings of stories with personal symbolism that I kept to myself and were very different from the work I showed in my classes. I eventually went back to painting and drawing. I also kept writing, and did some work combining those two disciplines. I discovered the work of the American poet Kenneth Patchen who became very important for me. I was especially interested in his experiments incorporating visual elements into his poetry. I moved back to New York in 1980 and found employment in a succession of part-time jobs that gave me ample time for my art. My exposure to the surrealist poets of Spain and South America at this time was most important, and presented a conceptual breakthrough in how I thought about my art. I wanted to paint pictures that were visual equivalents to the writing of César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet. In 1982 I spent three and a half months in India. I had always been interested in the mythological complexities of Hinduism and their depiction in Indian art. The mixing of human and animal form had always felt true to me. I attended Hunter College graduate art program and received an MFA in 1989. In my last year of graduate school I began making books. The desire to make explicit the latent imagery in the semi-abstract paintings I was doing at that time fueled this venture. Over the past few years I have moved away from a collage/multi-media approach that has been a mainstay of my work for many years. I wanted to focus more on the figures in my work, and have gradually come to strip away anything that obscures the intensity of their expression. Dale Williams Brooklyn, NY, 2005