Consoling Friends II

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Clasped together in an embrace, the closeness of the two women in Consoling Friends II, a charcoal drawing by Evelyn Williams creates a unified visual form expressing the strong bonds of love and friendship. The women’s clothing, drapery, hair and elongated figures, are resonant of figures found in early Renaissance paintings and carvings. The figures have a strong sense of three-dimensional form, influenced by Williams’ interest in making sculptural reliefs in the 1970s.

Who are these women and how are they linked? Who is consoling whom? The woman at the right with long straight hair closely resembles photographs of the artist at the time, but her identity is left ambiguous. As so often in Williams’s work, identities remain a mystery. Williams was drawn to the ambiguity of human relationships, commenting that she preferred her art to question, ‘... not to be one thing or another’.

Friendship, intimacy and particularly a sense of consolation between people, is vividly expressed in this work. Williams created it in 1977, three years after the death of her first husband, the artist Michael Fussell (1927–1974). Consolation was a recurring theme of her paintings, prints and relief sculptures at the time. Although she and Fussell had divorced, and she had remarried, they remained in touch. She later commented how her exploration of consolation was greatly influenced by an innate need to console Fussell in his final days. As she said in a 2007 BBC interview, ‘We all have problems and we all try to help each other.’

Evelyn Williams was born in London in 1929 and she died in 2012. She studied at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art and had a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1972.

Places

Subjects

genre, woman, grief, friend

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), charcoal, charcoal drawing

Artist

Evelyn Williams (1928 - 2012)

Title

Consoling Friends II

Date

1975

Medium

Charcoal on paper

Dimensions

height: 78.50 cm, width: 68.80 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Fischer Fine Art, February 1977

Inscription

br: Evelyn Williams 1975

GAC number

12723