(1956-2024) Born in Santa Barbara, Williams arrived in San Francisco in 1979, via Santa Cruz and Sonoma, attending art classes along the way. Prior to San Francisco, his work consisted mostly of landscape painting. After arriving here, the excitement of the new avantgarde changed the ballgame for him. Over the years, he has amassed a humongous collection of images, all indexed and catalogued, from a variety of sources — comics, advertising, art reproductions, encyclopedias, and even pictures found on street comers and in trash cans. He creates stencils out of many of the images and uses them over and over in different combinations. The stencils play a much larger role in the work than merely easy reproduction. The squiggly lines and odd solid shapes, from which the images and their backgrounds are constructed, are created by the use of the stencil.
