Sacred joys of making Art

Franklin Williams, of Petaluma, is rare among modern artists.

He’s never read an art magazine, stays as removed as possible from the current “art scene,” and - as he willingly describes himself - has always had very little interest in painting.

Williams does paint, of course, as part of the process through which he builds remarkably detailed, intricately crafted works of art that defy categorization. The uniqueness of his work has not stopped critics and curators from confining his work to categories over the years. In fact, Williams recently returned from an event called the “Nut Show” at the Parker Gallery in L.A., an exhibit that includes some of Williams’ work. “Nut Art” is one of many artistic movements - “Funk Art” is another - which Williams has been assigned to ever since the 1960s, when he first became known as an artist with a truly distinct vision. His pieces are in museums all over the country, and for many years, he served as professor of painting and drawing at the California College of the Arts in Oakland.

A lifetime retrospective of his work, titled “Eye Fruit: The Art of Franklin Williams,” is on display through Aug. 27 at the Art Museum of Santa Rosa.

The Argus-Courier recently had a conversation with Franklin Williams. True to form, in conversation he is mysterious yet open, thoughtful yet hard-to-pin-down, much like his lifetime of astonishing creations.

Q: You appear to be very, very busy right now. You’ve got art shows, museum events and talks, retrospectives, interviews. There’s a lot of interest and activity going on around you and your work at the moment.

A: Yes, I am fairly busy right now. I kind of hid away from all that for many, many years. I never wanted to do too much of that, shows and explanations, and all that other stuff that goes on around artists, all of the political part of the world.

I’ve been just living in paradise, making art.

Q: ‘Just making art,’ sounds like you’ve given yourself permission to just create the things you want to create, without thinking about who might purchase it or what might happen to it. Is that what you mean?

A: I never thought about who’s going to purchase my work, never in my entire life. I do what I do because it gives me great joy. I was taught that lesson by people who knew what joy was.

I think of art as a calling, not a career. I don’t look outside myself very often, because of that. So I live in a kind of magical place, I suppose.

Q: A lot of artists would be very envious, since so many of them believe that life has not given them the opportunity to just follow their creative impulses and not worry about that other stuff.

A: I think life is made mostly by our choices, by understanding that if you have a gift, you could lose it, easily, if your hands aren’t busy, and your eyes aren’t working to see and to find those things in the world that you really want in your life, to work with, as an artist. It’s a sacred act. Art is not about focusing on money, power, and the gathering of things. It’s something much deeper than that, and that’s where I’ve been able to spend my life.

Q: You used the word ‘joy.’ How do you define that for yourself? And how do you find it?

A: How to I define and find joy? By keeping my hands busy. By constantly moving towards a sense of perfection. I love the Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, who truly tried to do that, to seek perfection, to refine his prose and his words, and to squeeze them down to the essentials. So I’m on the journey. It’s really wonderful, and I get to do it every morning after I eat my oatmeal. It’s pretty perfect.

A: Many artists try to avoid labels, try to keep clear of having their worked categorized as belonging to one style of art or another. How do you feel about your work having been tossed together into various ‘movements’ and approaches? ‘Nut Art,” ‘Funk Art,’ and all of those?

Q: (Laughing) Well, you know, those things just kind of come along. There are people who create movements. They search around, and they find look-alike stuff, if they can, and they create a name for it. That’s what they do. I don’t take it very seriously. Those ‘movements’ are just moments in life, and they pass so quickly, I don’t take it too seriously at all. I know where I’m going, and I think I know where I’ve been. Once in a while, someone comes along and adds my name to a list of artists doing similar things, and that’s fine. That’s just what some people do.

Q: Your work is very tactile, built from fabric and overlapping paper and canvass, with threads and layers and bumps and crevices. I’ve been to enough museums and art galleries to know that you are not allowed to touch the art on display, but I have to say, in the current exhibit in Santa Rosa, I had a very hard time keeping my hands in my pockets. I’ve never been quite so drawn to want to touch the art pieces. They all seem to be shouting, ‘Feel me, touch me, I have all of these interesting textures.’ I did manage to not touch anything, but I guess you could say I had a very ‘tactile response’ to your work.

A: (Laughing again) That’s wonderful. I learned to do the American Craft, as it’s called, having grown up with women who crocheted and did tatting and made quilts, and so on and so forth. I knew a lot about it, and I even knew how to do some of it. A lot of my process came from those folk artists in my family.

A lot of my work is made in my lap. I like to hold them as I work on them.

There is a piece of mine in the Berkeley Museum, and I was over there one time and I saw that it needed a little attention, so I was touching it, and sort of playing around with it – the way you wished you could – and I got scolded, and taken by the arm, and escorted out of the museum. For touching my own art.

They finally had to put it in a plastic box, and hang it on the wall like that, because too many people were fondling it. And I thought, ‘Oh man, that’s not what I had in mind at all.’ I hate seeing my work behind plastic. There are two sculptures in the Santa Rosa show that are behind plastic, too.

They decided that they had to be protected from people who, unlike you, could not keep their hands in their pockets.

I suppose that, if my work has a life beyond the present, then someday they’ll all be in a plastic box.

Q: If so, I’m glad that, for now, we can still see your work outside of those boxes.

A: Yes, that’s good. (Laughing once more) That’s the way I prefer my work. Outside of boxes.

(Contact David at david.templeton@arguscourier.com)