Painting since 1958

Don Williams was born in Baton Rouge in 1941. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1961–62, earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska in 1964, and completed his MFA at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1966. He went on to serve as a professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

1969 was the turning point. After graduate study and teaching, Williams moved to San Francisco and entered the city's gallery and museum community — the beginning of a long association with the Bay Area's modern-art world. He has lived and worked in the region ever since, and is based in Sonoma.

From there he has painted the subjects that recur across the whole of his work — locomotives emerging from coastal fog, roads at night, the interiors of schools, halls and houses, and the low, wide light of California.

His paintings, pastels and charcoals are built slowly. A nocturne is not a night scene so much as a study of what remains visible once the light is nearly gone. In recent work the surface itself carries that warmth: gold grounds laid beneath the image, so the painting holds its own light.

The work is held in museum, corporate and private collections across the United States, and has been shown in solo exhibitions from San Francisco and New York to Tokyo. He continues to paint from his studio in Sonoma, and sells directly to collectors without a gallery in between — a selection of originals is available now.