Megan Williamson
Italian Landscapes
Megan Williamson is a painter formed by the sophisticated use of the French modernist tradition. Although her paintings may look at first glance especially indebted to the Fauve painters -- Matisse, Marquet, and Roualt, for example -- they contain as well solid abstract structure derived from an understanding of Cubist principles of construction. This of course was also true of the finest of the Fauves. Her double debt to them and to the Cubists is a hallmark of her great compositional acuity. Since the coming and going of Abstract Expressionism, with those exceptions, there has been very little work of an expressionist figurative nature in this country which can claim either her pedigree or her intensity as an artist. An expressionist artist shows herself in the way the brush dances over the canvas, annotating the forms and colors of the motif. But only the very rare expressionist also shows a sensibility refined enough while in the throes of painterly passion to find absolute pictorial locations for these paroxysms of gesture which fulfill their pictorial needs. The exact placement, or exact replacement of every mark and each color must occur for the painting to succeed. And all of this needs to be done at white hot speed. This she seems able to do without fail.
- Gabriel Laderman
28H x 21.5W inches Painting on Paper 1990 (unframed)
26H x 18W inches Painting on Paper 1990 (unframed)
19.5H x 23.75W inches Oil on canvas 1998 (unframed)
28H x 21.5W inches Painting on Paper 1990 (unframed)