Painting Emotional Games
- by Jon Devin, Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Kiersten Williams stands in front of her studio wall. On the right the painting Hopscotch.
Artists are familiar with risk-taking, an essential skill in developing something with visual and aesthetic appeal. Whether it’s expressing an unpopular theme, or experimenting with technique, artists create their own artistic voices when they try something they’ve never done before. One Memphis artist-on-the-rise, Kiersten N. Williams, can tell you that life, like her art, took a turn from mundane to magical when she finally decided to throw away the rulebook.
At the age of 26, Williams, a native Memphian, already has impressive credentials as well as a knack for surprising people with the maturity of her work. Currently, her paintings sell in Little Rock and other Mid-South venues. She recently headed to the U.S. Virgin Islands to teach a month-long class in collage at the Caribbean Museum with her boyfriend, fellow-artist Anthony Lee. She accepted an invitation from international artist Eric Noel to participate in a show in Amsterdam, and she’s eagerly awaiting details of her first solo show in Memphis in April.
Williams is about to take the hearty step forward from local to global forums, so how did she get to this point?
“(Risk-taking) is scary,” says Williams, at home in her basement studio at Marshall Arts, downtown. “It’s a whole new territory. Your whole life you’re taught to go to school, go to college, and get a job. Just to do something like being an artist, with no rules, manners or restrictions is tough. And no one in my family has ever done it before, so it was up to me to get it done.”