Biography

Scott Williams is a painter living in New York City. His work is done exclusively from observation and executed on site, from preliminary drawings through the completion of an oil painting. This process can take hours, days, weeks or months (and sometimes stretches over a period of years), and is dependent on season, weather, and other variables that may or may not be in his direct control. In his work Williams is drawn to the particulars of place that indicate the life lived there: the history, the industry, the roadways, traffic, homes, vehicles, or other more ordinary details of the landscape. He is similarly drawn to the constant flux and flow of people that one is constantly put into close and observable proximity with in a city like New York. In an effort to observe and respond to these particulars in as unpremeditated a manner as possible, generally enabling greater discovery during the process of painting, chance operations have sometimes been used as a means of determining his subject matter, whether cityscape or portrait. As a teenager Scott Williams studied with California Surrealist Gordon Wagner, and later attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he was a student of Op Art master Julian Stanczak. He received a Masters degree from the University of California at Davis. There he studied with painter Wayne Thiebaud. Scott Williams first began exhibiting his paintings while still in his teens. His work has been seen in numerous venues in New York City and across the U.S. Williams teaches at Pratt Institute and New York City College of Technology.