An award winning professional artist, Tony Williams RSMA SWAc has exhibited at the Royal Society of Marine Artists annual exhibition in the Mall Galleries London for the past six years and has exhibited at The Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Tony lives and works in rural Devon.

Tony Williams’ paintings showcase the irresistible light of the sun, and evoke the parallels within physics, industry and the industrial world as it once was. The figures now become a host of ghosts from an age of lost industries. walking or more likely, cycling with the ever present cigarette, dwarfed by the monolithic vastness of ships or winding gear. Workers in a landscape of cold steel, smoke and noise, often deafened by hydraulic riveting and leaning in together to hear conversation. The paintings are not intended to represent actual events but are an evocation of the spirit of comradeship generated by the harsh nature of their work, often drawn from fragments of black and white reference. The sun is emblematic of the white heat, born out of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. Our sun serves to connect continuity which links us to them.

“My paintings are populated with a workforce appearing as the ghosts of a long-lost host, a throng of spirits entering or leaving their former place of work. The theme evolved from a series of ship studies taken from pictures I shot on an old Rollie flex camera in the 1960’s. The paintings were not started until 2013 however. It was easy to become obsessed with the gritty images. The hugeness of ships hulls, and the stark contrast of scale with the movement of figures on the ground. These fused together by the graphic elements of heat, light and atmospheric smoke. The images are envisioned from those scraps of reference and imagination stoked by a studio filled with the sounds of ‘Kind of Blue’. The paintings are evocations of the atmosphere rather than actual recorded events.

The Sun inhabits the sky in these pictures to represent a crucible of white heat that represents the industrial process. This interplays with transmitted and reflected light in the composition to enhance a texture of steelwork, mist, smoke and diffused light which shrouds the ghosts as they drift homeward.

The ubiquitous bikes and ever-present cigarettes are the symbols of an age. My pictures are an homage to the guts and hard labour that shaped their working days, with deafness caused by hydraulic riveting often choreographing an intimacy between the figures as they strain to hear a silent conversation. We were dependant on the characters who built ships, mined coal and forged steel, they sustained British industry and our economy and painting them is just a small tribute to that endeavour.”- Tony