Item Description

Oil on board

36 x 52

Item Special Note

Thomas Williams started drawing at the tender age of 12, after comic books had piqued his interest in the ability of the pictorial to convey meaning and further a narrative. His high school years were devoted to tutelary having concentrated on the trade, tools, and techniques of commercial art, including an enthusiastic exploration of painting and airbrushing. Williams declined an invitation to attend the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983, opting instead to pursue his artistic training at Chicago’s American Academy of Art, where his concentration had been in rendering the human form.  During the course of Williams’ formal education, he had been introduced to the joys of depicting landscapes, and he has been drawing them ever since.  Williams had continued his scholastic endeavors at Chicago’s Columbia College, where his studies had focused on illustration, design, and figure drawing.  His entrepreneurial efforts began during his early years, wherein he sold original airbrush creations as a teen; for the past fifteen years, Williams has worked in the profession of advertising, dedicating his free time to watercolor workshops and artistic creations in colored pencil, acrylics, and oil paints of a more personal vein. Williams has also drawn the comic “Shoplife” for Shoptalk magazine. As of late, Williams has been inspired by the works and guided by the gracious attentiveness of fellow artisan Kevin WAK Williams.

Artist Statement

I have been influenced by quite a few styles since beginning my adventures in art, but my greatest affinity has always been with the proponents and masters of Realism and the Baroque Period, as I have deeply admired an artistic ability to capture the emotional and active essence of a particular moment in time, in media res. I perceive my own artwork as consisting of a tangible suffusion of the manifestation of my creativity and vision, which helps to animate, or “breathe life,” into my objects d’art.  I am equally enamored with multiple media, showing no favoritism towards the many tools of my artisan calling, whether acrylic paints, pastels, watercolors, or airbrushes, each of which upon I rely to assist in making my subjects transform into vivid and realistic depictions of that which is nebulous or ephemeral, the fruits of my combined imagination and perception.