HOUSE PAINTER, paintings, 2026-2017

“I started this series with a sense that I couldn’t see anything, I could only see the things right in front of me. I tried to find the depth in the flatness and banality. It took me a long time to see what I was doing, what was behind what I was painting, even though the drives and intuitions were quite insistent. I realized that sense of connection and presence I feel so easily in the studio, in solitude and emptiness, I was trying to bring that into the home, a place where connection and presence was a bit more elusive for me. I started to see how much time a painting could hold, in all its brushstrokes, while still being still, and how much space could be held also.

I map a kind of blueprint for a batch of paintings with some guidance and reflection from the last batch I have made, and an accumulation of word notes guided in turn by intuitive and then conceptual approaches. Though lead by the notes, I make no study or plan for composition, and though I generally know what the subject matter will be, for instance “bedroom with two beds” (a note for the painting “Bed” below), I create the paintings as I go along, painting one thing and then another without correction, accepting my brushstrokes and solving the puzzle as I go along. I use a mix of imagination and resource material , like a large unwieldy file called “bed”

- Margaux Williamson

“There is a certain kind of genius that doesn’t ask you to congratulate it for the tortuousness of its process, that communicates its vision openly, that shares its code.”

- Ben Lerner, “Margaux Williamson’s Hard-Earned Magic”, Frieze magazine, Issue 213, 2020, London

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