Still life

No date or place written here and nothing I can recognize there exept perhaps for the vase which might be a little Valauris vase that came to me from my sister recently and Gege before that. I could be wrong. What is wonderful here is this gathering of personal and familiar objects that are like a subjective self portrait. A small glimpse into the soul of a man I have only faint memories of alive, but countless of accounts of him all strange, comical and wonderful.

From my mom's collection and mine

These are 3 great examples of how great M.J.W. was at sketching and putting down colours quickly. In the middle image you can see my grandma standing and looking towards him. This must date from when they were living on a river boat in France. I have a few photos of drawings from that era. The top one is a sketch of friends with my grandma on the very left and my aunt Martine on the right. It says "Mauritus 46" so is from the time they lived on Mauritus Island. The bottom one says "Menton, 1937" Menton is a small city on the Cote d'Azur. So they were still in France then. They left for Madagascar as the war started. My great grand father (we call him Grand-Pere) was established there and wrote to them telling them that since Monty was British, they had better get out of France before things got ugly. I guess having survived the 1st WW in the tranchees, He knew what he was talking about.

I especialy love here the rich tones of the sea between the 2 boats.

Long overdue!

I have long been meaning to create this blog about my Grandfather Monty. He was an incredibly talented painter and I am hoping that more info about his work can be gathered and more pictures posted of all his work. I have taken pictures of all the work of his I have had access to, mostly works owned by me and my mom. I will try to give as much info about each piece as I can and add to it as I go along. I will post a few to start soon.

Our family has sadly very few oil paintings of him. Only one I believe. My greatest hope with this blog would be to trace more of them. His favorite mediums were oil and pastels, but he use to sketch people in the street all the time and was a wonderful caricaturist. He had a legendary witt and sense of humour that both his sons inherited (He had 4 children from 2 mariages)

His son Garth Williams also became an artist - and a famous one - who illustrated over his lifetime hundreeds of books including many American classics like "the little house in the prairie", "Charlote's web", "Mister Dog"... and many more. I will do a blog about him too once I am well ahead with my curent ones. Here is a great article about him: http://werewolf.co.nz/2009/07/classics-3/