Petaluma painter turns ‘fleeting thoughts’ into transformative art

The turning of turbulence and uncertainty into inspiration and beauty has long been the realm of the artist. To creatively face her own fears and feelings of heavy-heartedness at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Petaluma artist DeAnne Olguin Williamson discovered something electrifying.

In painting the faces of women — strong, defiant, powerful women set against textured backgrounds of slightly fantastical imagery — she was able to turn her own ever-shifting emotions into graceful works of art that gave her a renewed sense of hope and purpose.

What she didn’t recognize at first was that her pandemic-era series of paintings, titled “Fleeting Thoughts,” would provide the same sense of strength and healing in others that they had done for her in the making of them.

“I feel really strongly about inspiring, elevating and empowering women,” Williamson said, speaking from her home studio. “But this series started at the beginning of the pandemic, when there was so much uncertainty. And I felt very strongly that I needed to take my emotions — the weight of the world we, as mothers, were carrying — and create some kind of work out of those feelings. This work, this series, comes straight from my heart. It should be no surprise that others have been moved by them too, because whenever I create work like from my deepest feelings, it really does connect with other people.”

Williamson enjoys working in series that explore similar themes or employ a specific style. Her “Unfocused Truths” series also features the faces of women, enveloped in semi-abstract floral colors, while her “The Botanicals” series employs silhouetted shapes of ferns, vines and leaves, overlapping and colliding with exuberant energy. Williamson says the “Fleetings Thoughts” series has been the biggest series she’s ever done, both in terms of the public response to the work and also in terms of the sheer number of paintings she’s completed since starting.

“I’m still adding to the series, after all these months,” she said. “Sometimes, in the past, I do a series and then I move on to something else pretty quickly. But with this one, I feel like the ideas just keep coming and coming and coming. So I’ll continue with it until I don’t have any more ideas.”

In creating the striking works of art, Williamson uses a fiber paste to create a texture on her canvas, then paints onto that. The textures give a feeling of dimension that runs pleasantly counter to the graphical flatness of certain swaths of imagery. What’s striking about the paintings is that the women’s faces are quite realistic, with plenty of depth and expression, but the rest of the figures are two-dimensional, often constructed of clear patterns and small repeated images. Many in the series have a gravity-defying sense of design, the women’s hair sometimes doing feats of magic as eye-catching as it is fantastical.

One woman has antlers. Several are ornamented by birds.

And each painting has a title that reads like an affirmation or a particularly empowering line of poetry.

"Her Future Is Shaped By Hope." "Her Soul Has Wings To Fly." “She Came Through the Pain Stronger Than Before.” "All That She Wants, She Already Is." “It Was Heavy and She Carried It All."

That last one is the only piece from the “Fleeting Thoughts” series — openly inspired by the pandemic — that shows a woman wearing a mask. In keeping with the themes of heaviness and the carrying of burdens, the woman in the painting is also balancing the planet Earth gracefully on her head.

Another whimsical detail is that some women have necks constructed of grape vines, or display flowers and fruit adorning their heads.

“I think what I was doing there was connecting these women to the natural world,” Williamson said. “In particular the natural world of Sonoma County, its landscapes and colors and shapes. Nature has always been a major inspiration for me.”

Originally from Southern California, raised in Barstow, a small town in the Mojave Desert, Williamson attended San Diego State University as an art major, and then lived various places — “I’ve lived near the ocean, and I’ve lived near the woods,” she said — working as a graphic designer, before relocating to Sonoma County. Her husband is Greg Williamson, the President of CamelBak, which has its headquarters in Petaluma.

Williamson said after years of doing graphic design for other people, she finally began making art for herself after her son was born.

“I was always an artist. My whole life I always made art,” Williamson said. “But in order to get a job I became a graphic designer. It just never occurred to me that I could work and also be an artist, doing my own types of art. Not until I was suddenly home raising the little ones and I started using my art to express my feelings — and it just exploded.”

Since the move to Petaluma, and with her kids getting older — she has a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old — Williamson says has been focused on her creative projects, including teaching art journaling workshops, more-or-less full time.

“Art journaling is making art in book form,” she explained. “We use vintage books to begin with, then we create the art inside the books. It’s a little bit of meditation, a little bit of journaling and then all art. I really just teach the process of expression, more than I teach specific techniques.”

Her paintings are occasionally on display in small shows around the county, but Williamson’s primary point of contact with her audience is through platforms like Instagram, and on her own website, DeAnneWilliamson.com, where examples of the above-mentioned series are available for admiration, perusal and purchase.

Though she sometimes uses photographs for reference, mainly to inspire certain lighting ideas or moods, Williamson makes it clear that these are not portraits of specific people.

“They are meant to represent women, and all kinds of women,” she said. For the other elements, she does a great deal of research to determine what kind of imagery to pair with the woman’s face she has painted. “I have one called ‘I Carry Your Heart in Mine,’ and that one has poppies, because traditionally poppies represent remembrance.” The painting was created last year after she lost her brother, Williamson revealed. “I was thinking about remembering, and the idea of keeping someone’s heart inside your own.”

For the “Fleeting Thoughts” series, one of the most instantly understood was a piece titled “"Blessed Are The Nurturers For They Are Fierce As F--k,” a piece one can see on the site, where it is labeled as having already been sold.

“People really connect to the titles, and that one in particular,” Williamson said. “I painted it when all these local health workers were working day and night, killing themselves to take care of all the sick people. Remember when everyone was doing the howl every night for the health workers? I was just so impressed with them, how they are nurturers, but they are also so fierce about it.”

For that piece, she used white carnations blended into the woman’s hair.

Looking back, Williamson feels that the project has successfully accomplished what she set out to do. It’s helped her make sense of her feelings by connecting them to those of other women, mothers, helpers, healers and artists.

“Knowing that I’m not alone, that we’re all kind of in this together, that we’re all feeling the same type of things, has just helped me work through it,” she said. “That’s what art is to me. It’s how I’ve worked through everything difficult I’m been through in life. Art is healing. Art is transformative. It’s pretty magical.”