WILLIAM T. WILLIAMS (1942 - ) Chuckerbootstar Last.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 1972-73. 2032x1524 mm; 84x60 inches. Signed, titled and dated in red ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection.
Chuckerbootstar Last represents the evolution of the artist's important geometric abstraction in the early 1970s. William T. Williams has harmonized a geometric composition in deep secondary colors--purples, greens and browns--with a carefully textured surface. The paintings from this period mark a transition from the high key colors found in the body of work shown in his Reese-Palley solo exhibition two years earlier. Holland Cotter in The New York Times described Williams's new abstraction, as found in a similar work:
"Nu Nile (1973), finds the artist subtly altering a Minimalist model. The grid format has been broken up into a patchwork of odd geometric shapes tilted on a diagonal. The forms are separated by impasto ridges, making the painting look welded together. A pearlescent medium mixed into the monochromatic gray acrylic lends the surface a metallic sheen. As if to jazz up a simulated high-tech formalism, Mr. Williams marks the surface with a pattern of feathered brush strokes that have a mechanical regularity but catch the light like the ripples in watered silk."
Other works from this period include Skowhegan I, 1973, in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. They also precede the warmer, earthier palette inspired by "the dusty unpaved roads of North Carolina," according to David Driskell, found in paintings like Indian Summer, 1973. This is the first significant work by the artist made after 1971 to come to auction.
