The details of Margaux Williamson
Your painter's favourite painter
All the painters in my life love Margaux Williamson’s paintings. I get it—they’re otherworldly and visceral, intuitive and condensed with just enough information. Brushstrokes are confident, without falter.
These are paintings about painting. Debris is scattered throughout the canvas. A series of paint strokes comes together to create a hauntingly familiar tableau. The title of the solo exhibition now up at MOCA Toronto makes sense: Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars. The exhibition is a collection of fragments that gesture to the outlines of life. Not unlike how my bedroom floor becomes a composition of a life lived, Williamson’s paintings have the familiar quality of the beautifully mundane aspects of life.
Last week, while walking through the exhibition with Williamson, I furiously wrote notes as she spoke about the act of painting—the why, the how, the rules. “I have to look back to see where I’m going,” and “I have a policy, no corrections,” instead, the act of creating paintings “not through correction, but through addition.” I underlined words as they resonated, and a lot of them did. It was as if I were translating everything she was saying about painting into my experience with writing. So maybe Williamson is not just your painter’s favourite painter, but your writer’s favourite one too.
Below is an extension of Art Forecast’s Studio Visit series, where we get a zoomed-in look at an artist’s workspace. The idea here is somewhat the same: what do we usually not get to see in online documentation? Instead of taking haphazard photographs of the exhibition (no doubt already documented better by the gallery), I focused on the details: the brushstrokes, texture of the canvas, power of the pigment, etc, etc.
About the artist:
Margaux Williamson (b.1976) was born in Pittsburgh and lives in Toronto. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Queen’s University, Kingston, and was the recipient of an exchange scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art. Her most recent paintings were exhibited in a solo exhibition at White Cube, Hong Kong, 2023, marking her second presentation with the gallery. A retrospective of her work, Interiors, opened at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2021, accompanied by a publication, and travelled to other museums across Canada until 2023.
Love love the detail pics !
thank you for taking photos with those details in mind (and sharing!). always what i look for myself as an artist.