How I Met Warner

When I met Warner Williams for the first time in 1997 he was already resigned to a premature death from alcoholism, as well as from his state of terminal frustration at being a perpetual outsider in the art world.

Just before we met, I had a life changing experience as I was walking past a familiar cafe on College Ave., in Oakland. This cafe, once known as "The Edible Complex", had been one of my favorite places since high school. The place had two big rooms, with high ceilings, and big windows letting in lots of light. It was through these big windows that I saw something startling and fresh and never before seen in this familiar place - 10 or 12 big and small Warner Williams paintings, nicely hung on the high ceilinged walls. I was instantly frozen with the vision, as if in a dream where you are continually looking for some god like perfection, but now in real life it finally appears. A vision so familiar and so new, all at once, I was drawn like a magnet into the cafe.

I went one-by-one past the paintings, as the patrons dined contentedly, and I felt the molecules of my body start to change in response to the light and the depth and the shapes and the colors exuding off the canvas. I could not believe my eyes. This is what I had always been looking for, without knowing specifically what I was looking for.

I was looking for this - an evocation of the State of California so nostalgic and masterfully composed, that it was all consuming and undeniable, instantly. This was the Edward Hopper for the land of the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane - this was Van Gogh for the age of hot rods and the Stratotcaster guitar - this was the Vermeer who created a new song of California out of the illusion of depth and space - this is the Picasso of a cubism of the landscape. Warner collects references and influences from the entire history of classical and modern Western art, into a faultlessly, seamlessly realized body of work..

And 22 years later, I can not exhaust all the things that can be said about Warner's work.

But a lifelong love affair with an artist and his art has to begin with one painting - a painting, that when you see it for the first time, is like falling in love at first sight.

For the record, at this great first sighting I saw such paintings as Pink House with Curved Freeway, Palm Trees, White Bronco, Motel Row, Pink Wall, and Dreamdate. But the final canvas was that love-at-first-sight painting, Green Canal. This painting, I had to own it. No one else could own it.

I urgently called the artist and requested the opportunity to purchase the painting - for the asking price of $250 (!) As it happens, Warner lived a block away in a fine old apartment building at 5530 College Ave. Yes, he would sell me the painting, and we agreed to meet at the cafe on a certain date and time.

I went to the cafe to meet him at the appointed time - but many minutes passed and he never showed up. I was concerned about getting this painting. I urgently called him and asked WTF? He apologized and explained that he was afraid of crowds and meeting people, and that he couldn't meet me at the cafe, but if I wanted I could come up to his apartment and make the deal there.

Well, alright. I went straight over to his apartment, and he let me in. At this point, I was transported into a wonderland that I have never left since. In this small two room apartment was his painting studio, plus all kinds of strange plastic collectibles, Fender guitars, stained glass windows and furniture he had made, model ships and a model of a gold rush town, and paint brushes, and tubes of oil paint, and the smell of oil paint and linseed oil and turpentine, and 35mm slides, and drawings and studies, and those unique collages made out of cut-and-pasted scenes from real estate catalogues. I felt the presence of the Old Masters oozing out of every nook and cranny of this place. This was the eternal studio of the artist, that has continued much the same since Master Leonardo during the Renaissance.

We made the deal, and I bought the painting. I have been in love with this painting ever since.

Then Warner informed me that there were more paintings, in addition to those hanging at the cafe. And where would those paintings be, I should very much like to see them??

They are in this large closet, where the murphy bed used to be stored. Well, ok, may I look in the closet?

Yes.

As I looked into this closet I felt an energy go up my spine, as though I had just found a closet filled with twelve tons of gold and silver coins from ancient Atlantis. Here were stacked paintings that are to me the ultimate golden image of California, capturing all of my feelings of alarm, endearment and humor for my State. But I also felt in my gut that these were going to be worth the same as Van Goghs and Deibenkorns some day.

As Warner started to tell me his story of his struggle with failure, poverty, depression, suicidal urges, raging alcoholism, loneliness, hating his job and his boss, and his utter disgust with the contemporary art world, I realized that I was destined to try to help him save himself and his art.

So began a friendship and working relationship that has continued to this day.

Our story and our collaboration on behalf of Warner's life and work, will go down as one of the greatest stories in the history of art.

Saving Warner has been like saving a giant piece of Western Civilization that is vital to our survival and our humanity. At least that's how I feel about Warner and his work. And it has been a mighty difficult responsibility for me. By God's Grace, we made it this far.

(Stay tuned for further chapters of the Warner Williams story, as told by
Theo Cedar Jones)

The Post-Cubism of Warner Williams

Warner Williams' recessional post-cubism
and the overcoming of the Illuminati eye

Around 1986, Warner Williams made a creative breakthrough by establishing his unique painting style in a mature form that has continued to work with surprising consistency for over thirty years. One key element of this breakthrough is Warner's unique compositing method of multiple vanishing points into a single unified whole. The unification of combined perspectives is a trademark of Warner's paintings throughout this period and to the present. This method can be seen as an important new development in the history of cubism, so I am calling it "post-cubist".

Traditional cubism was typically constructed by the artist making visual snapshots of foreground objects in a still-life, from multiple vantage points, and interpreting these into a kind of faceted composite of these many views. Traditional cubism responds to still-life items, or foreground items as its subject matter. Warner's paintings turn this principle inside-out by responding to background items, like large vistas and horizons and landscapes, instead of objects on a table. In other words, Warner's cubism is a compositing of multiple points of view of recessional space, whereas traditional cubism is a compositing of multiple points of view of iconic, or foreground space.
For me as a viewer seeing Warner's works has an extraordinary effect of releasing me from the fixation on a single vanishing point in an image. Likewise, it releases me from the feeling of being locked into a rigid foreground/background relationship in an image. But how does this equate to being released from the hegemony of the Illuminati eye?
The Illuminati eye is conveniently illustrated by by the pyramid with an eyeball on top on the back of the U.S. dollar bill. The single eye at the top of converging lines is an emblem of the vanishing point in forced perspective within art and imagery. The eye represents the ego of the individual human, meditating with cyclopean fixation upon itself. All of the lines of perspective are all forced to orient themselves to this one single ego-eye, and no other perspective is allowed.
The single eye, heirarchically placed, is an emblem for ego, fear, and absolutism. What is needed is the restoration of the second eye. Humans possess two physical eyes; stereoscopic vision in human beings requires a continual cognitive compositing of TWO distinct visual streams of information into a unified and meaningful whole. In a spiritually awakened human, the third eye becomes active, and in a sense, the human is now making a meaningful composite out of three data streams.
Interestingly, Warner's paintings often utilize found imagery from three distinct, different source images. A conversation among three points-of-view is no longer a hegemonic image forcing us into a single point-of-view. A harmonious integration of multiple points-of-view into a unified whole suggests that beauty and unity are possible in this healthy conversation. This unity does not come at the expense of any one of the points-of-view in his paintings; each point-of-view has tons of character in its own right, and each of these characters is interacting fruitfully with those adjacent to it.
The three- and four-part structure to Warner's paintings is also suggestive of the three- and four-part structures typical of rock songs - verse-chorus-bridge, or verse-pre-chorus-chorus- bridge - and rock songs have certainly been a prime influence to Warner as an artist.
These are positive associations indeed - that Warner's work is connected to the structure and liberating force of rock and roll; that Warner's work suggests the awakened sensibility of a person with three eyes open; and the beautiful harmonizing of disparate points-of-view suggests a functional defeat of the Illumaniti's one-perspective-or-else perspective.