Art UK has updated its cookies policy. By using this website you are agreeing to the use of cookies. To find out more read our updated Use of Cookies policy and our updated Privacy policy.

Painter, born in Georgetown, British Guiana, now Guyana. His first art education was with the Working People’s Art Group, but it took an encounter with the Warrau Indian tribe to decide him to pursue the course he did in painting. Coming to England in 1952 Williams decided against a career in agricultural engineering and attended St Martin’s School of Art, 1952–3, having his first one-man show in 1954 at the Archer Gallery. In the mid-1960s he was active in the London-based Caribbean Artists’ Movement, he was showing widely in group exhibitions in Britain and abroad and was painting a series of murals. After a while Williams’ career tended to be diverted to fringe galleries when he fell out of general favour. Arshile Gorky, the pre-Colombian iconography of Guyana and in the 1970s a series of pictures inspired by the Russian composer Shostakovitch all had their place in Williams’ art.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)


Do you know someone who would love this resource?
Tell them about it...