I have known Evelyn Williams since 1961. She came to sit upon my sofa, not so long out of The Royal Collage of Art, via St Martins. She was quiet and composed, a pale, remarkably beautiful girl, with hair long enough to sit upon, regarded with awe by her fellow artists, and indeed by me. (I at the time was just someone who worked in advertising. 'Art' was a serious, different world). Evelyn had just won the John Moores competition for sculpture, at a time when the work of women artists was recognised only after much male harrumphing and hawing. But the profundity of her work, from the beginning, was impossible to ignore. And she is still, in her mid-seventies, beautiful, grave, and composed.
After the flurry of the John Mores prize, proper recognition was a long time coming, but her following was always there, and amongst the most discerning of critics. She has had a steady series of major shows in public galleries – including the Whitechapel in 1972, the Riverside in 1984 and Manchester City Art Gallery in 1997.
She was to move easily between sculpture – sometimes in clay, often in wax – I think that pale, plastic substance with its hint of holiness, of reverence, always appealed. On the surface what she gives us are calm, quiet images of people sleeping, embracing, searching each others faces for information, gently inclining towards one another – but the underlying tragedy is always there. It’s when she goes into endless repetition of the image you see it most clearly: one yearning person can touch you, a frame full of a hundred will terrify you. One baby in the sun charms: a thousand streaming from a central sun creates a frightening beauty.
While other lesser painters flounced, emoted, took to drink or drugs, gained and lost names for themselves, and drifted in and out of group cultural awareness, Evelyn worked steadily on, following her own vision, her own artistic intelligence, unmoved by fashion. The result is a body of work, imbued by an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness. It is ‘awesome’ – if we can get back to the true sense of the word. It fills you with awe.
Evelyn once wrote asking ‘Is there a disease that manifests a person taking upon themselves the suffering of the world? What is its name? I believe I have the disease. In my case it is at the very centre of my work’.
True enough, and the paintings you see here are not easy, certainly not frivolous, and are not exactly going to cheer you up, but in their restraint, their gravity, the sense they impart of female endurance, female beauty, the power and seriousness of love between woman and child, woman and woman, man and woman, her sheer courage in taking on board the nature of the universe in its most unsmiling mode, they achieve greatness, and will outlast all of us.