2:30pm Friday 27th August 2010
By Will Gore
William Winter is a remarkable artist. At the age of 83 he is continuing to produce countless works of art and his still flourishing career is now being celebrated with a retrospective exhibition at The Gallery @ Handmade Frames, in Teddington.
Working from his home studio in Hampton Wick, where he has been in situ for the past 50 years, Winter always has six pieces of new art on the go at any one time and this exhibition takes in the full sweep of a career that he began as a student at Sutton School of Art and then Kingston School of Art in the mid-40s.
Throughout his career, Winter has worked almost exclusively in the abstract – his paintings and drawings are made up of a series of overlapping and interconnecting shapes, lines and coloured shaded areas.
Winter says: “Whenever I start a new piece I have no idea how it will turn out – my art is entirely non-premeditated. I make an initial mark and once you’ve done that you are really committed. I only then add other lines or shapes that relate to that first one.
“I know a piece is finished when I feel that all the parts – the use of colour, texture, line and space – are all working in a relationship as a whole and that any extra mark would be superfluous.”
The influence of poetry and his time studying stained glass at the Royal College of Art are influences on Winter’s work – music, in particular classical and jazz, also plays a vital role in inspiring him.
He says: “Much of my inspiration comes from music and music is abstract – it is all about sounds following each other in the same way that I deal with shapes that change and lines that blur.”
As well as producing a lifetime’s worth of art, Winter is also father to seven children, many of whom have followed him into the art world. He says their support and that of his wife, Peggy, has been invaluable to him.
As you would expect, the large Winter family are well known in the Hampton area and Handmade Frames’ owner Daniel Gask was a childhood friend of Winter’s son Nathan – Gask has particularly fond memories of the family’s pet donkey, Joe, that the artist and his children used to take for rides in Bushy Park.
Winter came back into contact with Gask when he started using his framing service – Handmade Frames has been open in Stanley Road for just over a year and this exhibition is its gallery’s first major venture. This is a fascinating and challenging show to kick things off with and a fitting tribute to an octogenarian artist whose appetite for the abstract is still as healthy as ever.
William Winter, The Gallery @ Handmade Frames, 107 Stanley Road, Teddington, TW11 8UB, August 28 - September 25 (Monday - Saturday, 10am-5.30pm), free, 020 8943 2967, hand-made-frames.
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