Dale Williams

"Osip Mandelstam", acrylic painting, portrait, political exile, poetry, resist

2019

"Human Welfare" is an acrylic painting on paper measuring 36" high by 24" wide. It is one of 50 portraits that comprise Profiles in Democracy. Savage in their execution, they are nevertheless heartfelt expressions from the artist – politically, socially, culturally – in some cases featuring text and language in the portrait. In this case, the reference to Paris October 1979, Boulevard de Sebastopol, marks the afternoon Dale Williams was in Paris and sketched the woman in the portrait. From Dale Williams: "Profiles in Democracy is a group of 50 portraits completed in 2019. They are an expression of sorrow at the fracturing ideals that our country now teeters upon. The portraits are mostly – not exclusively – imaginary: a populace viewed from the inside out, people that someone like our current president might call losers. They perhaps “live in gaudy poverty, powerful destitution,” to quote Osip Mandelstam...

"Idiot Wind, Sweet Reason" is an acrylic painting on canvas measuring 24" high by 36" wide. Again cutting to the quick, Dale Williams posits our best and worst instincts as a duality, and that duality as a confrontation. There's nowhere to hide in any of William's paintings, that's part of the charge coming off his canvases. That's particularly true with this painting – as hideous as these personnages may be in Idiot Wind and Sweet Reason, we recognize their struggle for grace. Press Release 2018: "Williams acknowledges a large range of influences on his vision: the moral lessons embodied in the works of 17th century engraver Jacques Lagniet, the darkling phantasms and tragic reportage of Goya’s Caprichos and Disasters of War, and the personal mythologizing of the late paintings of Philip Guston. Such works echo throughout Williams social surrealist re-visioning." – George Del Barrio, Vanderbilt Republic, Brooklyn NY Dale Williams has exhibited in the New York City area for the past 25 years. He is a 2014 recipient of a Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His most recent one-person show, “America Now Suite,” which re-visioned American history in service of the civic imagination, was held at Gowanus Loft, Brooklyn in October 2018. A selection of portraits from “America Now Suite” was included in the BRIC Biennial, Winter/Spring 2019. His portrait of Osip Mandelstam...

Alfred Aaron Wolmark (1877 – 1961) was a painter and decorative artist. He was a Post Impressionist and a pioneer of the New Movement in Art. He was born Aaron Wolmark into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland who were amongst the many subsequently fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe. The family moved to Devon when he was six before moving to Spitalfields, East London, there along with many other Jewish immigrant émigré families. He became a British citizen in 1894. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there from 1901-1936. (1895-8 (1st Silver Medallist for Drawing). There he took the name Alfred Wolmark, by which he is known. Returning briefly to Poland in 1903, he painted works based his Jewish identity and faith, refraining from depicting the persecution and anti-Semitism his family witnessed on the continent and idealising the peaceful and contemplative elements of his religion. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Bruton Galleries in 1905. In July 1911, after an artistic epiphany on honeymoon in Concarneau, Brittany, he became influenced by modern French painting, his colour palette and style became post impressionist, and Wolmark jettisoned his early methods in favour of the pioneering 'colourist' path that he followed for the next two decades of his working life. He was a British fauvist and pitched his tonal divisions to a higher key than any of his contemporaries. Wolmark kept to traditional genre, and transformed his subjects through the use of flattened forms, built up with a heavy impasto. His daring use of bright colour on some paintings such as "An Arrangement: Group of Nudes" demonstrate a skillset akin to Andy Warhol and earned him the title of ‘The Colour King’. the early colourist, Alfred Wolmark, the so-called father of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’. This group includes painters David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Jacob Kramer, as well as (by association) the sculptor Jacob Epstein, First World War poet-painter, Isaac Rosenberg, and the only ‘Whitechapel Girl’ Clare Winsten...

Unique oil painting on hand made paper, to be framed with a kiaat box-frame, floated and raised to the backboard. The size of 100 x 70 cm is that of the artwork itself, excluding the...