Sonny Williams

Williams creates paintings that are at once psychologically arresting and visually alluring. Rendering a precarious dichotomy of delicate aesthetics and uncanny disquiet, his paintings both challenge and seduce our common expectations of fleshly reality. With a distinctive collection of motifs that include melted skin, neck wounds, missing ears and weaponised pinocchio noses, he deploys a bold and uncompromising visual language. By means of these symbolic bodily manifestations his paintings bear witness to human predicaments in the contemporary world, describing them as “veridical glimpses that exist at least one layer behind an illusion”. With an exacting use of colour and inventive passages of oil paint, Williams intensifies yet endears these unsettling visions.
Whilst drawing upon the rich history of oil painting, Williams maintains a definite belief in the medium’s endless potential. His paintings are created by means of a rigorous technical process, making use of tenebrism, precise limited palettes and a layered non-formulaic “aging” which straddles both high realism and painterly improvisation in order to make unexpected visual breakthroughs.

Williams attended the University of Sunderland, graduating in 2001 with a first class BA in Fine Art, specialising in oil painting.

His work has been exhibited around the UK, including at Pilgrim Gallery in London and his paintings are held in a number of private collections.