Collection: Vivienne Williams : Painter : Bethlehem

Vivienne Williams was born in Swansea, she studied English Literature at Reading University taking a Masters Degree in ‘The Literary Response to the Visual Arts’ in 1978. She spent the next five years abroad, teaching English in Venice and Padua and working in an art gallery in Sydney where she began selling her work for the first time. Returning to the UK in 1983 she spent the next seven years studying and working in a Buddhist Community before becoming a full time painter in 1990, returning to Wales at this time.

She was a prize-winner at the National Eisteddfod in 1993. She received a highly commended prize at the inaugural Welsh Artist of the Year competition in Cardiff in 2000 and was invited to be on the panel of judges in 2008. Her work was purchased by CASW in 2003.

‘I paint flowers, fruit, pots, jugs and bowls – often on a table, lately with more views from the window, some objects in open landscape. Everything in the picture is rearranged and repainted many times, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out is a balancing act. The spaces are as significant as the objects themselves.
As the layers of paint build, the surface texture is energetically worked, scratched, sanded and stained. It always surprises me when a battle on the paper resolves itself into a calm painting’.