For 50-plus years, the late Rez Williams lived and worked as a painter on Martha’s Vineyard, an Island he loved and sometimes depicted in his striking oil paintings. However, his work was never of the typical seascapes-and-cozy-cottages variety that is associated with Vineyard art. His vision was unique. Not only unique to the Island, but very distinctive in general. It would be impossible to pigeonhole Williams into one school of art or another, and he garnered acclaim for his work from New England to New York City (where he was born and raised) and beyond.
Thomas Hoving, late director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took a stab at describing Williams work in an issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine, writing, “He paints out of West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard, but he’s about as far from one of those sticky-sweet chroniclers of island life and times as one can get. His scenes of the Vineyard smash into your eyes like crescendos. The spaces warp and move. The colors clash and rebound. You gaze at something like ‘Gay Head Light’ for a few seconds and you get out of breath. Williams is light-years beyond the Vineyard, yet no one has distilled it better.”
Now, for the first time since Williams’ passing in earlier this year, a retrospective of his work will hang for one day only on Saturday, Sept 28 at the Grange Hall as part of a Memorial Gathering to honor Williams’ life.
Mark Reisman, a long time collector of Williams’ art says, “His paintings are representational but he didn’t paint just what he saw. He painted what he felt. He tried to have a life force in his paintings. They are full of movement and light, playfulness and a sense of humor. They are never static. When you hung a piece in your home it never became part of the furniture.”
The selection, primarily drawn from Williams’ West Tisbury studio, represents the many phases of the artist’s career. According to Tanya Agostinos, who along with Williams’ widow, artist Lucy Mitchell, curated the collection, a lot of the paintings have never been seen by the public before.
Included among the work that will be on display are, variously, early Vineyard landscapes; large scale paintings of New Bedford fishing boats, Maine landscapes, back streets in Ireland, even a selection of self portraits.
In 2013 Williams was awarded the Creative Living Award by the Martha’s Vineyard Community Foundation, an annual award given to members of the community who have made significant contributions to the quality of life on the Island.
Williams is remembered by friends for his low key attitude and his support and encouragement of other artists.
“He was a generous person,” recalls Reisman. “He was generous to younger artists. He was very open to other people’s work. He wasn’t a competitive person. He just sort of did his thing.”
Reisman adds, “There was a humility about him. Rez was a very moral person, and by that I mean he wanted to paint the best painting he could paint, not necessarily what he could sell. He had standards and he was always true to those standards.”
The one-day retrospective of the paintings of Rez Williams work be on display at the Grange Hall, West Tisbury tomorrow on Saturday, Sept 28, open to the public for viewing from 12 pm to 5:30 pm with a Memorial Gathering from 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm
