Daniella Williams

Ultimately, my paintings attempt to discuss the complexities of intimacy and illustrate the act of looking and being perceived. Ever since I was a young girl, I can remember being fascinated by the human form, my own body and the implication this holds around themes of vulnerability and privacy. This responsibility we feel to be modest and embarrassed by ourselves but also to be admired and consumed is a universally shared dilemma.

Presently, I am working out of my studio in Toronto, Ontario pursuing my career as a contemporary figurative painter, developing my body of work and exhibiting my paintings. I graduated from the University of Guelph in 2019 with a BA(H) in Fine Art and Art History. Whilst studying I became increasingly drawn towards exploring ideas around intimacy, voyeurism, aesthetic beauty, insecurity; the precarity of these qualities and how this experience could be rendered in paint. In many ways, my paintings are equally a glimpse into my own world and subconscious as they are to that of my subjects.

At first, figurative painting started as a cathartic means to resolve my own conflicting feelings about my body, ideas around femininity and being a woman, through painting nude portraits of both myself and peers from challenging perspectives; often the unflattering, authentic moments. Currently, my focus has transitioned into what it means to participate in this relationship. My pieces explore the capacity between tender and intrusive, challenging the viewer’s concepts around the act of looking. Although these ideas are constantly evolving, their commemoration to contemporary painters such as Edward Hopper, Eric Fischl, Jordan Casteel remains. Through expressive brush strokes which look to the impressionists, and a warm colour palette, the visceral flesh of each subject is developed.

I draw from my own intimate memories, art history and contemporary life to create a narrative of mundanity around the pleasure we extract from consuming images. Thus, I invite the viewer into a moment of contemplation within the private sphere; to become an active agent within a world behind closed doors, the unseen moments only we ourselves participate in

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