Warner Williams - California Painter

The greatest visual artists in America in the current generation are Shawn Wolfe, Adi Da, Charles Burns, Jerry Uelsmann, Jaime Hernandez, Jim Woodring, R. Crumb, Alex Grey, Richard Misrach and Cindy Sherman; but most of these are not painters in the classical sense. They are the ones, however, who are the most worthy successors to the leading lights of early Modernism.

How has Warner Williams managed to ascend into these august ranks? I intend to show that Warner has satisfied many of the requirements of great painting, from the Renaissance, to the great early modernists in America and Europe. I submit that Warner has earned his rightful place among the great painters of this or any age.

Warner's paintings and point-of-view

If Renaissance art was involved with asserting a single point of view, as well as a scientifically accurate vanishing point, then Warner's art follows the work of the cubists, who began to shatter the single point of view of classical art, and introduced highly complex interactions between multiple points-of-view within the work.

As a viewer, it is difficult or impossible to enforce a single point-of-view or vanishing point on Warner's canvases; one must dance with the canvas to accommodate the ever-shifting visual and spatial relationships between one cluster of abstract shapes and another, with no one point-of-view ever becoming the dominant one.

Warner Williams - A great American painter
by Theo Cedar Jones

After the 50's, and the great post-WWII surge in American painting, painting faltered in America, in part because it's vital power was overshadowed by the Beach Boys and Rock and Roll as a new art form, as well as by television, video games and film. Warhol had the power and electricity necessary to compete with Rock and Roll, but very few other painters did, until Adi Da, Warner Williams, and the great comic book artists of the 60's-to-the-present.

There was supposed to be a torch passed from the post-war generation of great American painters, such as Warhol, Thiebaud, Diebenkorn, Pollock, O'Keeffe, Hopper, and Rothko, to a next generation of equally great painters in America. With the exceptions of Adi Da and Warner Williams, however, no living American painters have fully stepped up to the test.