What critics have said
“As with most of Williams’s pictures, the meaning is left open; she confesses to not always knowing it herself. Like all art driven by psychological necessity, hers is a struggle to come to an understanding with life. We’re left to interpret it by our own lights, and darknesses…For an artist of her age , Williams is startlingly modern. Mortality, identity, alienation, all the issues beloved of the Young British Artists are addressed in her work in completely original ways.”
Laura Gascoigne writing in The Spectator in 2003
“Evelyn Williams conceives of her figures as depicting aspects of relationships, figurations, perhaps of states of mind and you can move them around because relationships change, feelings change. It is as though she is transposing the novel as an exploration of human contact, the traditional art form for women…But that is too glib. It does not explain the air of unease that fills her work…She has been exploring the hitherto largely unmapped territory of a socially polarized female sensibility and so she belongs to that heroic sisterhood, the Brontes, Viginia Wolff, Sylvia Plath belong to it, who did not take what they were told for granted. And faced up to and tried to analyse the ambiguities inherent in their situation as women and as artists.”
Novelist Angela Carter writing in the periodical Spare Rib
“What impressed me profoundly was experiencing the poetry of an artist’s words and her images both flowing from her imagination. It was wonderful recording words which reflect the way an artist paints”
Dame Helen Mirren on narrating the film Evelyn Williams Works and Words 1999
“So there are still the ingredients for an embarrassingly dreadful exhibition of self-regarding expressionism…The mystery of Williams’s work is that far from eliciting sniggers of nihilistic derision, it creates an almost religious reverence for the vulnerabilities of existence. How on earth it does this is hard to tell. Perhaps there’s something disarming in her utter simplicity of imagery and touch. Certainly behind this apparently unguarded directness lies what she has defined as the “unstable and perilous position” of all women artists. Few if any of these pictures could have been done by a man”
Art critic and artist Robert Clark writing in The Guardian on the Encounters exhibition in Manchester City Art Gallery 1997
What critics have said
“As with most of Williams’s pictures, the meaning is left open; she confesses to not always knowing it herself. Like all art driven by psychological necessity, hers is a struggle to come to an understanding with life. We’re left to interpret it by our own lights, and darknesses…For an artist of her age , Williams is startlingly modern. Mortality, identity, alienation, all the issues beloved of the Young British Artists are addressed in her work in completely original ways.”
Laura Gascoigne writing in The Spectator in 2003
“Lasting art has nothing to do with fashionability or that infinitely flexible justification called “innovative” and everything to do with a painter responding with wisdom to today’s psychological big issues. It has also everything to do with being an intelligent inquisitive person eager to bear insular testimony to what it means to be alive at this moment.”
David Lee writing on Evelyn Williams in Art Review 1997
“Evelyn Williams conceives of her figures as depicting aspects of relationships, figurations, perhaps of states of mind and you can move them around because relationships change, feelings change. It is as though she is transposing the novel as an exploration of human contact, the traditional art form for women…But that is too glib. It does not explain the air of unease that fills her work…She has been exploring the hitherto largely unmapped territory of a socially polarized female sensibility and so she belongs to that heroic sisterhood, the Brontes, Viginia Wolff, Sylvia Plath belong to it, who did not take what they were told for granted. And faced up to and tried to analyse the ambiguities inherent in their situation as women and as artists.”
Novelist Angela Carter writing in the periodical Spare Rib
“What impressed me profoundly was experiencing the poetry of an artist’s words and her images both flowing from her imagination. It was wonderful recording words which reflect the way an artist paints”
Dame Helen Mirren on narrating the film Evelyn Williams Works and Words 1999
"Another painter too little known who yet enjoys the loyal support of a close circle of discriminating collectors and fellow artists. Her work is unfashionably figurative perhaps but unapologetically so with its inflated human scale, its monumental presence and religio-mystical associations. It is an idiosyncratic blend of Stanley Spencer and the Italian Gothic and Renaissance mural traditions."
William Packer writing in the Financial Times 2003.
“So there are still the ingredients for an embarrassingly dreadful exhibition of self-regarding expressionism…The mystery of Williams’s work is that far from eliciting sniggers of nihilistic derision, it creates an almost religious reverence for the vulnerabilities of existence. How on earth it does this is hard to tell. Perhaps there’s something disarming in her utter simplicity of imagery and touch. Certainly behind this apparently unguarded directness lies what she has defined as the “unstable and perilous position” of all women artists. Few if any of these pictures could have been done by a man”
Art critic and artist Robert Clark writing in The Guardian on the Encounters exhibition in Manchester City Art Gallery 1997
“All Evelyn's work has a deep contemplative stillness within it. The dignity of her figures - women above all - is a consequence of their listening hearts. Looking at Evelyn’s paintings I think of Keats’ “unheard melodies” ... love is her theme.”
Sister Wendy Beckett