Azaleas and Moss - Pattern & Gesture
Through the exaggeration of color, light, and surface, these paintings allude to the mystique of the Lowcountry. The paintings shape Williams’ familiarity with the region—its visual intensity, atmosphere, and cultural weight—offering a contemporary approach to documenting a place that is both lived in and continuously reimagined in his practice.
Williams uses airbrushing as a primary tool, working within a vernacular visual language of smooth gradients and glowing stars, a similar aesthetic to what you'd find on an airbrushed t-shirt. While this aesthetic is not exclusive to the South, it carries a distinct cultural presence in the region and is treated here as a formal method for constructing the image. Azaleas are rendered as glowing firefly-like blossoms, at once ornamental and ambient, familiar yet slightly unreal.
In the blue, black, and green paintings, Spanish moss appears both as subject and as a tool—Williams uses it directly as a brush, allowing its structure to produce uneven, physical marks that reveal the moss's anatomy. This approach shifts further into abstraction, shifting the paintings from direct representations of moss and into fields of color and motion.
Airbrushed Painting to Chamber Music Backdrop
In 2022, Spoleto Festival USA commissioned Williams to design a new backdrop for the Bank of America Chamber Music series at Charleston’s Dock Street Theatre. Replacing a longstanding depiction of colonial Charleston, Williams turned to his Azalea and Moss series, bringing a vibrant sense of rhythm and natural movement to the stage. Dusk originated as an airbrush and acrylic painting on paper, later digitally recomposed to create an expansive pattern, which was then scaled into a 40-foot backdrop. The work continues to frame the series through the 2026 season. View Chamber Backdrop.
