Joel William (1925 - 2014)

Joël WILLIAM (1925-2014) The Chestnut Tree Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower left 46 x 38 cm Biography: Originally from Saint-Etienne where he studied Fine Arts, this artist has been based on the shores of the Mediterranean for 25 years. A figurative painter with impressionist tendencies, Joël William, whose name has spread far beyond the borders of our Languedoc, exhibits throughout France and also abroad. His works can be discovered in Barcelona or Madrid and almost everywhere in Spain, London or Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland. A work full of sun and light, as critics like to describe it, distributed throughout Europe. It should be noted that he is also the president of the European Art Club. A singer of nature, highlighting an astonishing perspective that digs the depth of a picturesque old street or the vaults of an old cloister, he lingers on an attractive play of light on the coastal ponds, the villages of Languedoc, the lofty mountains of the Pyrenees, their lakes and their torrents. A red boat, gulls, an old balcony but also nudes, still lifes, flowers, compositions, and we cannot ignore these marvelous paintings such as the legend of "Daphnis and Chloe" with this curious superimposition of ancient statuary, a technique that can be found in other works such as his famous "Mare Nostrum" and which makes him a unique artist, recognized elsewhere through the salons where he was repeatedly awarded gold medals. Among his most recent prizes, let us only mention the silver-gilt medal of Arts, Sciences and Letters, the medal of the city of Mantes la Jolie, and gold medals in Spain and Portugal.