Metropolis 2013 Painting

McWilliams' vibrant, structural urban landscapes are intertwined with organic elements of smoke, and vegetation. Observed phenomena and painterly playfulness combine to produce a unique vision that is part fact and part fantasy. Dust clouds created by ant-like workers on vast scaffolds, glitter in the sunlight taking on ghostly figurative appearances. Victorian curvilinear palm houses provide structural containers for the vegetation-like paintwork, which creeps like ivy across the canvas, propagating textures and marks with a life of their own in the medium. Shana Nys Dambrot in Art Ltd Magazine described his paintings as: "Evocative, wavering, dimensional, architectural, atmospheric, and chromatically paradoxical--more than depiction, these paintings rise to the level of embodiment. Self-consciously in progress, his work, like his subjects, present a metaphor for the way the modern world is changing, that change itself has become the defining quality of our time."