Simon McWilliams

"Nanpu Bridge, Shanghai"

"Restoration Dust"  oil on linen  60" x 72"

"Smoke and Ladders"  oil on linen  60" x 72"

"Inside the Palm House 2012"  oil on linen

"M-Machine Number 2"  oil on linen  72" x 60"

I posted Simon McWilliams work about two years ago (May 2010) and he's been hard at work since then. He has a new show coming up in May down in LA at Skotia gallery in Culver City.

The subject matter of his work is primarily urban architcture, especially large construction sites which he interprets with a wild exuberance of color, as if these stuctures were not being built but were blooming in a hothouse environment. He also paints greenhouses so perhaps the analogy is an especially apt one. It's a fevered and fantastic take on the prodigious efforts we human's make to build new stuff all the damn time. The hothouse metaphor may remind you of the impact all this activity is having on the atmosphere and that does load the work with an angle of interpretation. But he does not address it directly. This is visual work first, conceptual second, if at all. He captures a kind of grand and dizzying chaos that is both beautiful and alarming. By doing so for purely visual reasons the potential for analogy to our own crazy civilization and it's dazzling potential for demise is made all the more powerful.
There's plenty of great stuff to look through in his website: www.simonmcwilliams.com