I Was Once a Good Little Boy (2017)
(Self-portrait with hindsight)

Christian Williams (American, born 1978) is a writer, editor, musician, and visual artist. Currently living in Coventry, CT with his wife and three cats, Williams was raised in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas.

Balancing a career in publishing with a passion for the creative arts, Williams has produced a prolific output in both. By day, Williams has been a newspaper reporter, Editor-in-Chief of Utne Reader, and editorial director of Ogden Publications, publishers of Mother Earth News, GRIT, Motorcycle Classics, and several other national magazines. By night, he’s a self-taught Renaissance man, enjoying success as a published poet and essayist, a produced playwright, a critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter who has released several albums of original music, and, most recently, a visual artist with a focus on spontaneous abstract painting.

Williams has been painting since 2012 and began formally exhibiting and selling his work in 2017. Inspired primarily by the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist movements, Williams views art as a source of universal wisdom and his role as a conduit to that wisdom. To that end, Williams employs automatic drawing and other spontaneous techniques to remove ego from the process and encourage a “selfless” form of pure expression where art dictates the message of the painting, not the artist.

Exhibitions

2018    Solo Exhibition, Every Day’s a Birthday, Love Garden Sounds, Lawrence, KS

2017    Collaborative, Wind Shadows, Cider Gallery, Lawrence, KS (public painting performance with composer/musician Brett Keating)

2013    Group Exhibition, Modern Views of Quantrill’s Raid, Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, KS