past exhibitions : rez williams

Rez Williams:
Steel Walls and Waterlines

November 13 - December 21, 1999

One may view some thing every day without a response. Then one day, when looking at that same object or place, is confronted with an emotional or spiritual reaction which sheds new light on the mundane. One day Rez Williams was sailing in the Vineyard Sound off Martha's Vineyard in his 17' sailboat Zig Zag, when he surveyed the fishing vessels he saw every day with new perspective. It was as if he had never truly acknowledged their strength, meaning and character. Later he would suggest that,

"beyond the forms of their brutal and powerful hulls and the absolutely gorgeous and often jarring combinations of their topside paint colors, these vessels represent the culmination of years of design evolution. They embrace an implicit acceptance and defiance of the everyday dangers of working offshore in unpredictable conditions."

To paint the roughened integrity of such fishing vessels, Williams sailed to New Bedford, Massachusetts to study one of the busiest mainland fishing fleets. Sailing in and out of the harbor, he took photographs and chronicled his voyages preparing for work in the studio. A true working harbor, New Bedford is not the place for casual sailors. The fishing vessels and other boats are commercial, and pleasure boats are not a welcome addition to the rugged scenery. Through his interactions with the harbor, Williams learned that the New Bedford side of the harbor was mostly Portuguese-American and that of the Fairhaven side was Scandinavian-American. Each group's trawlers are distinctive, reflecting cultural attitudes toward fishing and the sea. Many were built in the 1980's when legislation and tax laws made investments in new trawlers lucrative.

More recently, however, depleted fish stocks have impacted the New England fishing industry, which is under further pressure from government legislation that has challenged methods of fishing and regulated the quantities of catches. Though not overtly political in nature, Williams's subject matter is conceptually charged with a subtext of social gravity. With these issues in mind, Williams presents these trawlers in a new series of paintings, Steel Walls and Waterlines. This large-scale body of work, which includes six-by-ten-foot canvases, monumentalizes the subject with reverence and an eye toward the unpredictable. The vibrantly colored and distinctive paintings are portraits of working boats, icons of the often-unromantic reality of the fishing industry. These paintings also represent the painterly pursuits of Williams, who utilizes a mixture of short, precise brush strokes and wide, sweeping bands of color. This style enables him to reach the essence of his subject matter while avoiding the often-banal documentary nature of realist painting. The paintings are expressionistic documents of a culture and a way of life.

It is from the perspective of the water, as if in a boat, that Williams presents these trawlers to the viewer. We see them as the artist did at sea level, not from land or above. From the angles stressed by his skillful manipulations of the picture plane, scale is emphasized, while the character of the trawlers is revealed through the physical condition and tension between the stern and bow construction, as well as the use of vibrant paint color. In many ways these paintings bring to life the boats described in Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, which chronicled the plight of such vessels during a terrible nor'easter off Georges Bank.

Even though Williams has consulted fishermen on the use of rigging while dragging, reflecting his concern for painting the vessels "anatomically correct[ly]," these works transcend documentation to become portraits dominated by character, nuance, narrative, culture and history. In discussing his earlier landscapes Williams has proposed that, "A landscape is generally just what nature gives you. I generally try to twist nature and twist it violently. It¹s twisted because of my interest in man-made objects." Williams chooses to avoid the documentary nature of landscape painting, searching for instances of intrusion on the land and water while applying an expressionistic palette of often jarring juxtapositions of color. In his newest series of paintings, similar to earlier works, Williams reveals the different sides of his sense of nature. Recently, he painted a landscape of a highway wrapped around a cliff with a car speeding around a tight bend. Unsatisfied with the composition because of its documentary nature and near "perfect" scenery, he painted in another vehicle smashed and wrecked at the bottom of the cliff. In his paintings of trawlers one must also look beyond the surface and subject matter for significant subtexts conveyed through scale, tonal contrasts, color and background elements. For example, the modern day dock life of the fishing industry is depicted in the background of many paintings where we find U-Haul trucks, pick-ups, random parked vehicles, armed Coast Guard cruisers, fish factories, ice factories and dilapidated warehouses. Often these structures and dock traffic serve as a foil to the fishing vessels, emphasizing the unromantic and rarely nostalgic life lead by these muscular working boats.

White Boat at Sea documents the rigging of a trawler dragging for fish with passionate honesty. The side rigging of the boat alludes to its function to stabilize the boat in a seaway and guide the net. Yet, it is the use of perspective and the low horizon line which draws the viewer into the painting and in turn creates the sense of imbalance and power of the rolling seas. No matter how much steel is used to construct these vessels there is little question that the boats can be easily overwhelmed by nature. The White Boat at Sea has what Williams describes as the "hot rod" look. This aesthetic is also found in Lutador. It offers the cleanest of lines: two racing stripes, a red undercarriage and a snubnose cabin with sleek railing. The sleekness is amplified by the beautifully abstracted, rudimentary design of the commercial building, which frames the vessel and accentuates the lines of the boat's 1950's roadster quality. Again, the tipped angles and use of perspective thrust Lutador forward on the picture plane giving the structure integrity and confidence while stressing the flatness of the picture plane.

Courageous, from Fairhaven, is another example of one of Williams' s monumentalized vessels, but here we begin to see what the artist has described as the "Jeckyl and Hyde" of most trawlers. Painted in profile, the port side reveals the powerful bow in stark contrast to the rough and mysterious working area of the stern. Half of the canvas is subsumed by water, forcing the trawler to be cropped on two sides. The net and gears are shrouded in black tarpaulins and the grittiness of the stern appears to be part of a different vessel entirely. In this painting we see the structure of a monumentalized portrait of a boat, which is then undermined by the artist's willingness to reveal the vessel's dueling identities and spatial relationships. The portrait is conceived in three sections: the top left, the crew's quarters, the working area at the top right, and the ocean at the lowest section of the painting. These three areas represent life on a trawler. The working area, where the money is made, does not express a desire to keep up appearances and we sense that it is an area under constant stress. In contrast, the steel walls separate the living section or cocoon from the working area. It is a sanctuary of sorts above the sway of the ocean and is the only place to be relieved from the exhausting labor. The 5/8 inch steel walls of the hull and cabin define the space and are the only barrier the crew has from the treacherous elements. Williams has also suggested that the flatness and one-dimensionality of the sky and water at sea are mirrored in the one-dimensional steel walls of these boats. In this painting the constricting flatness of the vessel's walls, as experienced on-board at sea, are complemented by the acceptance of the flatness of the picture plane, which reflects the one-dimensional and solitary reality of living and working on a trawler.

As the twentieth century comes to an end, and abstract art has been eclipsed by representational art, and the hybridity of postmodernism has been accepted, Rez Williams has reconciled disparate painting traditions of American art once thought to be irreconcilable: regionalism and abstract expressionism. In many of the paintings, including both versions of Iberia II, the water and sky dominate the presence of the trawlers. For the crews of these boats, who may spend weeks at sea, the water and sky are more familiar to them than docks and people. Williams contrasts dock life with life at sea in the paintings. By stressing nature's scale over man¹s intrusion within the waterscape, the paintings impress upon the viewer how much nature dominates the life of a fishing vessel. Sky and water are also vehicles for Williams' colorful expressionistic palette. The application of paint, most prevalently in the sky and water, bears a resemblance to the expressionistic gesture of Franz Kline's broad stroked abstract work. The fishing vessels, buildings and cars recall the realist/mannerist touch of Thomas Hart Benton's regionalism. These "full blooded" pictorial gestures and measured respect for the subject also reveal the artist's admiration for Lucian Freud. Yet Williams goes far beyond these artistic influences to create works which are aesthetically distinct. His choice of theoretically charged subject and study of the human imprint on the land/waterscape further characterizes the artist's intimate relation to his subject matter. In describing his perspective Williams has written of these trawlers,

"The title of the exhibition Steel Walls and Waterlines attempts to convey the poignancy of a life where men go offshore, cocooned within slabsided steel vessels. This is a world of mind-numbing work relieved by periods of anesthetizing boredom. There are poetic resonances in the chance encounter of cold welded steel plate and the swelling grey expanse of salt ocean. The bow cleaves the sea, propelled by reciprocating cylinders; water closes in behind the stern, silently erasing all traces of passage. The vessel's painted waterline underscores the mystery of this uneasy relationship. Studying these scenarios in the mind's eye, while the boats lie idle at their slips, is what these paintings are about."

In his series, Steel Walls and Waterlines, Williams brings the monumentality of fishing culture to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland. As viewers, we are provided dramatic access to the life of such boats and an almost dizzying perspective of swelling waters. Combining his painterly styles and interest in the human presence and impact on the landscape, this series confirms Williams's independent spirit and constant need to challenge himself and the viewer.

Mark H.C. Bessire ICA Director