Pickering’s Gwen Williams learned portrait drawing in the trenches

My December 2011 artist profile in the Ajax/Pickering News Advertiser

The majority of artists typically go through a formal period of training -- at art school, in university, or in workshops with master teachers, etc. However, Pickering portrait artist, Gwen Williams didn’t go the traditional route, with her schooling being, instead, years of rigorous practice of live, on-location training in the highly intense arena of commercial portrait sketching. For a 25-year period starting in 1963, she participated with small squads of sketch artists at the annual Toronto shows: the Exhibition, the Home Show and the Sportsman’s Show, churning out 2-colour (in 20 minutes) and full-colour (45 minutes) portrait sketches that not only had to be attractive and quickly done, but had to persuasively capture the precise likenesses of a kaleidoscopic panorama of customers. And she excelled at it, being so gifted at capturing exact appearances that she became the go-to artist the organizers brought in to redo portraits by her art squad mates who failed to meet the likeness standards of disgruntled clients. 

Her sketch work eventually led to more formal portrait commissions handled through various art galleries throughout the GTA and environs. And, as well, she began making portraits for personal clients, a practice that continues to this day. 

Born and schooled in Toronto, her father encouraged her natural artistic talent by bringing home reams of scrap paper for her to use for drawing. She sold her first piece of art at the age of 8, an aerial warfare dogfight, as she recalls. And she won an art competition at the age of 14 – with a portrait of Winston Churchill, a precursor of a life-long fascination with drawing people that was to follow. She, along with a fellow artist, started the Art Guild of Scarborough in 1960. Married at 19, she and her late husband raised two sons.

Williams submits work to various juried shows, gives portrait seminars and is visual arts coordinator for the PineRidge Arts Council. She’s also a member of the Ajax Creative Arts group and Pickering’s Silverstone Gallery for whom she recently did a knock-out charity portrait of Willy Nelson on a guitar. On the horizon?: she’s thinking about making portraits with multiple images that imbue her drawings with more meaning. 

Gwen Williams’ contact data can be found on the PRAC website at www.pineridgearts.org