Sue Williams, Yellow with Santa, 1994

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acrylic on canvas

182.88 x 162.56 cm
72 x 64 in

While viewed as something unimportant or mindless, the doodle is often the means by which insight occurs and ideas come to fruition. With this terminology, Williams slyly inoculates what is...

While viewed as something unimportant or mindless, the doodle is often the means by which insight occurs and ideas come to fruition. With this terminology, Williams slyly inoculates what is in fact a subversive and critical practice of appropriation in her early work. Drawing underscores Williams’ painting practice. She recalls a pivotal studio visit by Elizabeth Murray in the late 1980s: "She said my paintings were awful but my drawings were really well developed. ‘So why don’t you just draw on the canvas,’ she said." Williams began to do just this : she smuggled paper and pencil into painting by covering her canvases with a thin Japanese rice paper called Masa, Projecting drawings onto them with an overhead projector, and then tracing the images in pencil. She also started to pilfer through magazines, advertisements, and image files at the New York Public Library to collect source materials from contemporary culture. The Doodle - and it’s associations with linearity, the hand, representation, and popular imagery - opened up a world of images to Williams as well as tactics for their analysis.

Provenance

Private Collection, Toronto, Canada
303 Gallery, New York

Group Exhibition: Memory

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Maruani Mercier

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Sue Williams United States, b. 1954

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Provenance