After Darkness, Sue Williams Discovers Lighter Hues of Life

It’s taken Sue Williams a long time to recognize herself as an artist. That slow awakening is the central subject of her largely autobiographical work about domestic violence.

The subject of an exhibition on view at Regen Projects through April 20, Williams’ work has generated lots of glowing press over the past few years, and her simple line drawings paired with darkly humorous captions were included in the last two Whitney Biennials. Her new paintings, however, signal a marked shift in direction.

Lyrical, painterly paintings devoid of text, which combine abstracted passages with crudely drawn figures, they suggest Williams has tamed some of the demons that previously drove her, and that she doesn’t intend to be pigeonholed by her celebrated work of the last few years. Just how bold a move this is becomes evident in talking with her; Williams had to work hard on many different levels to be able to make these paintings.

Born in 1954 outside Chicago, where she was raised, Williams was the second in a family of four children. “My parents were unhappy people and there was lots of tension in our house,” Williams recalls during an interview at the gallery. “My father was interested in art though--he did oil paintings and let me take Saturday classes at the Chicago Art Institute when I was a kid. My parents eventually stopped letting me take art lessons because I was flunking out of school--in fact, the only reason they let me go to CalArts was because my older brother, whom my mother respected, told her she should let me go there.

“I had a hard time my first year at CalArts, which is too pressured and sophisticated an environment for someone just out of high school. When I first got there I was making vaguely psychedelic art and drawing little doodle people, but that work was totally dismissed, so for a while I hid out and kept trying new stuff, but abandoned every idea I came up with.”

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Things took a turn for the worse during her first summer break, when Williams was shot and gravely wounded by someone she dated in Chicago. “The bullet just missed my heart and came out my back, and I had to have lung surgery,” she recalls. “At the time I was living at home with my [now divorced] mother who didn’t like that I’d been shot, so we never discussed it. I couldn’t indulge my emotions, so it was almost as if it hadn’t happened.”

After recovering, Williams spent a semester at Cooper Union in New York, then returned to CalArts to finish her schooling. “At Cooper Union I made these dry, Minimalist paintings, so when I returned to CalArts I struggled to learn how to have fun with art again because I’d gotten so far away from that. I wanted to inject some humor into the Minimalist stuff I was making, so I started adding fences to the paintings, then stick cows, then stick people.”

After graduating in 1976 from CalArts with a bachelor of fine arts degree, Williams left art completely behind as she embarked on a downward spiral that lasted six years. “I’d never taken myself seriously as an artist and after I left school I moved to New York, got involved with the punk scene and spent all my time partying,” she recalls. “Then in 1979 I moved to England and really bottomed out.

“I was leading a completely wretched life, hanging out with drug dealers and living in squats, and the thing that finally forced me to wrench myself out of that scene was the fact that my boyfriend was beating me so badly. The night I realized I had to leave him I was home laying on a mattress on the floor and he came in, grabbed me by the hair, and picked up a mallet that he started swinging, just missing my head. Somehow I managed to get out the door--I was so lucky there was somebody in the street that night because they saw what he was doing and helped me get away. He was the worst abuser I was involved with, but unfortunately he wasn’t the last.

“When I got back to New York I had two black eyes, several broken ribs and was delirious. Some friends sent me home to Chicago, where I spent three years severely depressed while I tried to get my life together. All I wanted was to learn how to sit in one place and do my work, but I had such a hard time sitting still. I moved back to New York in 1982 just as figurative work was being revived by the East Village scene, but I still had no idea how to access the art world, so I didn’t participate much in that.”

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Supporting herself with a series of odd jobs, Williams continued to make work for 10 years; her sensibility didn’t really ignite, however, until 1992 when she exhibited her first body of work dealing overtly with domestic violence at a New York gallery.

“That was a time for social issues in art, so it seemed like the right moment to show that work,” she says. “It still hadn’t occurred to me that my own experience could be the subject of my work, though, and at that point I didn’t think I was making work about myself. I had no trouble revealing myself in my art because I thought I wasn’t,” she says with a laugh. “One of the things that enables women to tolerate abuse is the capacity we have to disassociate ourselves from it.”

Williams’ ability to finally talk about the dark parts of her past, coupled with her 1992 marriage to Girard Fox, who is a chef, mark a dramatic turning point in her life. The couple now live with their 18-month-old daughter in Brooklyn, which Williams says “is a much better place for me than Manhattan was. And having a child made a huge difference in my life.”

Of her first series of paintings without text, Williams says: “I used to feel intensely alienated, so I talked through my work because I needed to express myself, but the words were starting to make me feel pinned to the wall so I decided to eliminate them.

“The way I work is very compulsive--I love doing the doodle people and could keep doing them forever. But I want to push things, to be a painter and jump into the realm of mainstream art, so I’m struggling to move my work away from the literal. The themes associated with my work are things I continue to work through because those things are ongoing, but these are happier paintings,” she says. “They’re more free, and can do what they want.”

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Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., through April 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 276-5424.