Bernard Williams counts billboards, Spiderman, baroque Italian portraits, and “those paintings you see at the end of Good Times” among the influences that have shaped his ten-year career as a painter. Then last year he saw a video on Wassily Kandinsky at the Terra Museum. The way the music on the sound track connected with Kandinsky’s abstract shapes and colors revealed a whole new perspective to the realist painter. “That show was sort of the pin that broke the bubble,” says Williams.
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For Williams, 30, who has an MFA in painting from Northwestern and teaches a drawing class at the Art Institute, these paintings are just the first step; he wants to take his synthesis of European art, contemporary African art, realism, and abstract expressionism even further. “Jazz musicians took swing music and did something new. I want to paint from my heart and gut and do something new that stands on the shoulders of the old.”
