Ashley Williams

Do you ever wonder why people pan for gold? Seems like a lot of time and effort, right?  But when those few nuggets are found – eureka! - all that work pays off. This helps explain why I keep looking at students' artwork. So much of it isn't promising at all. But, once in a blue moon, a discovery is made. This past Fall, Laura and I made one of those rare finds at Univ of Virginia... Ashley Williams is a  rare gem.

Hanging in the hallways outside the artists' studios, two large works on paper caught our attention. We were floored. Craftsmanship, detail, layered imagery, provocative subject, and very very fresh. Ashley's work had it all. Luckily she was in her studio and we were able to introduce ourselves.

  

From there, Laura and I have been working to get Ashley's work out to the public. An obvious decision for us was to take her work to the Affordable Art Fair in NYC. She agreed. We’re psyched. This is the kind of stuff New York needs. And we can't wait to get the reactions.

On a local level, Ashley is currently participating in a student show at the UVa's Ruffin Hall. A reception is being held this evening. I strongly recommend you find the time to attend. See firsthand what has us all aflutter.

A little about Ashley: She is from Roanoke, Virginia and will receive her Studio Art and Art History degrees this spring from UVa. She has already been awarded the prestigious Aunspaugh Fellowship and will continue her studio work at UVa next year. She has studied classical drawing in Italy and has exhibited in various artist shows around Virginia. Ashley is also a gifted creative writer (not hard to imagine based on her painting).

About her work, Ashley says this:

Like the city streets, the modern world floods our bodies with information.  Scientific advancements and improvements in communication technology mean that it has become increasingly difficult to extract the useful from the extraneous.  In response to this, our bodies function as a system that both absorbs and discards sounds, statistics and images.  However, this internal system is inefficient.  We cannot contain everything and the process of filtering out information can cause us to overlook what is most important.  Stillness is sometimes necessary.  My art, in some ways, is about reclaiming what has been filtered out by embracing the confusion, diagramming and displaying it.   It is a process, I think, similar to long-exposure photography.  Like the earliest Daguerreotypes, the lens is left open long enough for images to crowd the picture plane, overlapping each other until, like the famous shoe shiner in "Boulevard du Temple", something important begins to surface.  It is only through observing and accepting the whole, that we eventually find our focus.