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Williamson, Margaux
At night I painted in the kitchen La nuit, je peignais dans la cuisine
2014 2013

“At night I painted in the kitchen” is Williamson’s largest painting in the 2014 series “I Could See Everything”. It is a still life that features everyday objects painted as they might sit on an average table: a few bananas, beer bottles, cabbages, yesterday’s newspaper. The table has been radically flattened and cropped so that it floats in the centre of white gessoed canvas. With a particular rich tone of darkness, echoed by the blackening bananas, it captures a mood that is tied to a solitary night-time kitchen, and an artist’s working process. Williamson describes the feeling of the painting as coming from the realism of the day mixed with the abstraction of the night. Both its large size and its un-posed composition make this a highly unusual still life. Through its gestural brushwork and its curiosity toward the commonplace, it eschews the genre, insistently moving away from typical study of representation or composition. The painting’s world-within-a-world and its care for the ordinary make it a foundational image for the whole series.

Williamson, Margaux
Pittsburgh PA 1978 Pittsburgh PA 1978
At night I painted in the kitchen La nuit, je peignais dans la cuisine
2014 2013
Oil on canvas Huile sur toile
160.0 x 228.6 cm
Purchase, Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Grants program and the Art Centre Acquisitions Endowment Fund (Queen's University), 2015 Achat, Programme d’aide aux acquisitions du Conseil des arts du Canada et Fonds de dotation pour les acquisitions du Musée d’art Agnes Etherington (Université Queen’s), 2015
58-003.01

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