Ron Williams points out all the different flowers and wildlife in his painting at his artist talk at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts on Sunday, June 7th.
-by Beverley Phillips
Folk artist Ron Williams shared both his passion and his process at an artist talk on Sunday.
Williams came to Nova Scotia in 1988 from Alberta and worked as a forestry technician for the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Environment. He now lives and works in West Arichat. His art and the name of the exhibit, Ground Truthing: an outside life, a solitary story, collective myth, come from those years of working in the forest. Ground truthing is a term from work that refers to getting out on the ground and documenting what is there, and his paintings reflect what he saw. They also reflect who he is, an outdoorsman who has often worked alone, and yet his personal experience reflects our collective story, as nature is part of each of us.
Williams’s art has been on display at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts since May 17th, and sitting in the gallery surrounded by it, he described what was behind some of the pieces and talked about his process.
He became an artist in 2016 when he was looking for something to do as he recovered from surgery. And while he has had no artistic background or training, in listening to Williams, you know he is a true artist who finds inspiration all around him. When he began his journey into art, he said, “I imagined some guy in a lighthouse, or living in a cabin deep in the woods, and he wants to decorate the walls. So he’d go to the shed and use whatever he found there.” And that’s how Williams came to use Tremclad rust paint as his chosen medium, and found items, like discarded windows for frames or old tents from the Department of Environment for canvases.
Along with his memories of the forest, the West Arichat resident said the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons, with their characters, and the quilts his partner, Karen Roy, sews also influence his work. He said it wasn’t intentional, but being surrounded by her work, his layouts and colour schemes often reflect her work.
His passion for the natural world comes through clearly in his words and his works. All of his paintings are experiences or memories of being out on the land, paddling down a river, or in the air in a DNR helicopter. “You can tell he has been out there,” said one of the talk attendees. Each flower, tree, and critter reflects a real species that has been in that environment, even the polar bear on Sable Island. Yes, documents record polar bears as having visited the tiny island 300 km off the coast of Nova Scotia on very rare occasions.
He considers each piece an experiment, and he’s continually working on something new. “I have so many ideas,” he said, “and when I can’t use them in a current work, I use them in the next.”
And though he has an abundance of ideas, he does occasionally get stumped. “When that happens,” he said, “I do something familiar and something new always comes out.”
To check out Ron Williams art, the exhibit will run until June 14th at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts, 16080 Highway 19, Inverness. You can stop by Tuesdays to Sundays, from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.