Imagine, if you can, coming out of some dark, a dream, a room, as a child to see not a hallway but a sea, giant hulls of steel boats upon you, massive but unobtrusive, gently overwhelming color fields, only to pass back into some dark. That’s Rez passing by. –Patrick Phillips
Rez Williams died on Sunday, Feb. 4. Rez, artist, conservationist, husband of artist Lucy Mitchell, was one of those humans who die but don’t. One of those people who so saturate a community with quiet kindness, revered talent, and keen sensibility that those who barely know his work or him can still sense something bigger in the day-to-day.
A memorial show and gathering was held at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury on Saturday. The collection, masterful and thoughtful, and occasion were pulled together by Tanya Augoustinos, longtime collaborator-as-gallerist of A Gallery.
Hermine Hull, West Tisbury artist and longtime friend: “I especially liked seeing all of the self-portraits. Rez painted one every year. They presented a continuum of his physical life and his art life, of similarities and changes, of his artistic preoccupations at the time. Some were hard-edged and dramatic of color, looking straight out from the front of the canvas. Others were softer, with brush strokes that caressed the edges they described. As a group, they were a reminder of the complicated, funny, thoughtful, incredibly innovative painter and friend he was.”
Ruth Kirchmeier: Longtime friend and artist: “Viewing Rez’s extraordinary and powerful paintings, I am saddened at the fact that he will no longer be creating others for the world to savor. At the same time, I am intensely aware of my good fortune to have come to know and love the man who made them.”
Paul Karasik, Cartoonist and friend: Chance meeting at Alley’s Post Office last January: Me: “Hey, Rez! How are you doing?” Rez: “I’m painting.”
Gwyn McAllister, longtime arts writer for The Times: “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.)”
Nancy Shaw Cramer: Artist, gallerist and friend: “In a room filled with Rez’s large, powerful paintings, his small self-portraits were mesmerizing — gazing at you from every wall. The various palettes and composition styles he used in the boats and landscape paintings could be seen in the portraits with unexpected colors, bold strokes, and his sure hand. A consummate artist, the self-portraits made the collection of work complete.” (Arts & Ideas)
Tanya Augoustinos, Friend and gallerist: “Williams is well-known for painting the brightly colored, steel-hulled fishing vessels of New Bedford, where he has for years explored the abstract elements of a local industrial subject. ‘The elements of sky and water in these paintings were structured to work with the dominant form of the vessels, and so took on both a subordinate and abstract function’; ‘In the Irish landscapes, this hierarchy and crutch were gone. There was no tyranny of the image; the composition was now democratic, and this has become almost socialistic in the Monhegan paintings,’ he says.” (On Rez’s site)
For more information on Rez Williams’s artwork, contact A Gallery and Tanya Augoustinos.
