FoundSF

"I was there..."

by Robert Collision

Scott Williams in his kitchen.

Photo: Robert Collision

I first visited Scott Williams’s flat at 20th and Shotwell starting in the early ‘90’s, looking to collect artwork directly from the artist himself. At the time, his spray stenciled paintings covered live-work spaces, automobiles, burger joints and bars in SF’s Lower Haight and Mission districts. Murals in the streets, warehouse lofts and back alleys—everywhere cool had a Scott Williams painting.

Mural in Clarion Alley by Scott Williams

Photo by Dimitri Loukakos

Since we had mutual artist friends I guess I was a trusted visitor, with cash in hand. The kitchen in the back was his hang out, library and studio, coffee and cigarettes in the air, I’m sure since he moved there in 1989. The long hallway from the entrance functioned as art gallery—its walls covered with his most impressive paintings I could never afford. In a side room, on table and floor, his cut stencils and final paintings were gathered in giant piles. I fell in love with the many weird animal plywood cutout paintings in his kitchen, and bought a trout fish painting that day for 35 dollars. On later visits I bought more of these cutout paintihttp://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangesngs: quail, pronghorn antelope, wolf, disturbing red-faced monkey on tree limb.

Although I worked for minimum wage, I got the sense Scott thought of me, over time, as kind of a well-to-do patron. Paintings obtained on subsequent trips include a triptych of 24x36 paintings on paper, done while he was out of his mind on an extended bout of epilepsy, self-portraits of an artist unable to stop creating—so beautiful and disturbing, his “laughing at the abyss” work. Also a large Doggie Diner painting on pegboard and large collage painting on plywood from his Old West series.

I feel that, to Scott, his stencils were as much the final art piece. In the ‘90s he showed me how he would project images for transfer onto the fridge, giving him a large open area to transfer onto a stencil sheet. He’d work long into the night, when it was most quiet, smoking Export As and cutting with #11 X-acto. Scott said he took pride cutting on average a stencil a night for 40 years— totaling over 15 thousand works! Some stencils were like lace in detail—I think he just loved the process of cutting paper. Later he could no longer breathe in the toxic fumes of spray paint and switched to the airbrush. His work evolved into densely collaged artist books. He showed me a series of pages he’d been working on since 2020, his pandemic series. Abstract magazine scraps collaged, around 50 pages in all— “No people, no text”. Brilliantly dense stuff which rivals earlier spray stencil abstract work like this for sheer energy.

Some years ago, a feral cat showed up and Scott started feeding him. They became buddies but he refused to give the scruffy guy a name, on general principal. When he took him in for medical treatment though, they said the cat HAD to have a name. Scott gave them “Mouse Slayer”.

He loved his El Faro super carnitas burritos, a block away; crusty sourdough, strong coffee and tobacco, never booze. Hated all sports and TV. I don’t think he would mind being thought of as a misanthrope. His smoking indoors had to end when the landlord upstairs put his foot down and Scott had to go to the parklet outside. The landlord allowed pot smoking indoors but not tobacco—Scott tried for a while but it wasn’t the same. He was so frail at the end, BUT managed to survive his many physical maladies long enough to enjoy the peculiar art subsidy known in SF as rent control—to the age of 68. On one of his smoke breaks, a total stranger, a young person, passed him on the street & asked “Are you Scott Williams?”...a fan of his art. That made him really pleased, being recognized for his work.

I like to think his stature in the artworld will only grow.