Eboney Williams is an artist who focuses on making figurative artwork and recently has been centring her work around exploring the theme of ‘sisterhood’. By doing this, Williams aims to create a narrative within her work, showing the experiences of being a sister through her own eyes. However, in the past, Williams has been known to combine her work with secondary research in order to create art that can be interacted with by a wider audience. To do this, Williams based her work on theory by Deborah Tannen that focused on the dynamics of sisters – specifically, her book ‘You Were Always Mom’s Favourite!’ was referenced throughout. Here, Williams took quotes from Tannen’s writing and used them to underpin her ideas.   

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Whether representing her own experiences or others’, Williams likes to combine realistic elements with ones of the surreal, as it gives her the freedom to manipulate her compositions without the constraints of reality. With this style of working, she approaches each piece in a similar way to that of a stage set – vigorously curating each scene and bordering the boundary between realism and the imagination.

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In her most recent body of work, Williams has been concentrating on the idea of Genre Painting, which allows her to focus on recreating interior, domestic scenes. In doing so, this has resulted in her representing the everyday life of being a sister in her work, by bringing light to the mundane and usually forgotten moments. Contrasting the synthesized process of creating her work, this gives an honest depiction of her experiences.

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Within these scenes, she has also been investigating the types of pictorial space that she can situate figures into. In particular, she has been interested in the contrast between areas of deep and shallow space. This, mixed with inspiration from Dutch Genre Painters such as Pieter De Hooch, allows her to experiment with the layouts of different rooms and their connections to each other. This resulted in her researching the idea of having canvases split into multiple sections, with each section representing a room with different types of spaces. Through her exploration into different types of space, Williams began to take inspiration from film to influence her compositions. Some of these included ‘Roma’ and ‘Dogville’.

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In terms of her artistic process, the act of drawing is something that remains constant throughout her work. Because of this, she experiments with a number of different mediums such as: graphite, charcoal and digital methods. Often, she uses these drawings to experiment with ideas and formulate her paintings. However, she also enjoys showing these drawings as a finished product in their own right.

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With her paintings, Williams has been working on combining the act of painting with drawing in order to create a cohesive body of work where the different media speak to one another. In doing so, she has been creating the effect of drawing through her paintings by using thinned down oil paint to build up thin layers, which mixed with a monochromatic colour palette, gives her work a delicate and unique style.

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instagram - @ebieart

email - eboneywilliamsart@outlook.com