ARTIST STATEMENT  by Donna Williams

The feral child of a challenged family on the fringes of society, I left home and school at age 15 and became educated in the many faces of social diversity; domestic prostitution, poverty, homelessness and emerged as a university graduate, then a world-travelled international bestselling author, public speaker and idealist. Tinged with the wild driving influences of bipolar, eventually, my autism became dominated by my ARTism and I emerged a prolific author, composer, sculptor, artist and screenwriter.

Unable till late childhood to understand much with meaning,  I excelled instead in the undervalued skill of sensing pattern, theme and feel; the System of Sensing.  I looked through everyone and everything, mapping patterns with my body.  I merged with colour, form and texture, resonating with these to the heights of manic oblivion, to the calm still depths of self hypnosis in which any conscious connection to my surface self no longer existed’. 

Crippled by Exposure Anxiety, I did not appear to be an artist in the conventional sense until my late 20s. I had only drawn one repetitive picture from age 3 to age 9 (a dancer, as taught through rote). From age 9 I drew cows based on small plastic cows and did this until I was left paints by my father around age 11 (the only way I'd take things is if they were left for me, not directly given). I produced 3 paintings and hid them in the roof void, afraid of the ability to paint which jolted me out of my preconscious state and into a terror caused by a conscious sense of my own existence, which I know as Exposure Anxiety.

Finally I took these paintings out and covered them in black paint so my own world couldn't be known or seen through this frightening thing called art. It took until my late 20s after writing Nobody Nowhere, that someone again gave me paints, that I produced my next collection of paintings. I gave them all away and the paint ran out and I was too afraid to buy more paint and didn't know how to ask for it. It was then not until my mid 30s that my husband's mother gave me a gift of some paints and I painted again, starting with the paintings, Next, Before and Woah. When the paints ran out, I whispered, shaking and with tears, to my husband, could he help me dare buy more paints. He did and with the mentoring of a UK art dealer, Serge Conein, I continued to paint and paint and paint some more. I now have over 100 paintings in my online gallery.

My painting style is influenced by the emphasis on light and movement in impressionism whilst retaining a strong emphasis on the emotional effect of expressionism. Works in the categories like 'Putti', 'Dreamscapes', 'Emotions', 'Inner worlds' and 'Solitary' are largely figurative, many without faces, reflecting my own faceblindness. In stark contrast are my abstract symbolic and expressionist works in categories like 'concepts' and 'Neoteric' .

As a sculptor, I paint sculpturally; I feel and intuit form rather than judge visually and largely use my fingers more than brushes.  As a natural anthropologist I let the inner worlds of my characters speak louder than their surface realities, often without the distraction of their surroundings, facial expression, clothing or other cladding, the colours, form, texture and feel are as important as the subject.  The subtle ‘music of beingness’ within my characters speaks like the essence of dreams, an empathic language that addresses emotional consciousness and ultimately provokes questions of ourselves.    

I sculpt from feel rather than vision. My hands tell me when something is ‘done’.  Similarly, like the formless clay, my paintings often begin as a mass of abstract shapes on canvas out of which my characters appear to carve themselves then progressively call into being the surroundings from which they have emerged.  My job as the artist is to facilitate and dialogue with, rather than overly judge, criticize or interfere with, that process.  Hence my sculpting feels more like being possessed by an artistic spirit that speaks through my hands to the sculpture, perhaps akin to channelling.        

Art, music and writing have taught me that peace is the balanced acceptance of chaos and brought into consciousness my inner Taoist.  My work derives from some strange internal dance between two equally powerful forces; passion and stillness.  In holding back from conscious judgment, something wonderful grows organically from a preconscious state and I’m along for the adventure.  What was once incomprehensible before me, finally sidesteps the directness of the conscious mind to speak evocatively more directly, more universally, to the sensual, feeling self, when fully realised in a tangible form.  In ‘beingness’ there is no judgment, only what ‘is’.                             

Welcome to the adventure….                           Donna Williams  *)