Rich Texture and Organic Surfaces

Visitors to Fleet Walk’s Artizan Collective Gallery during September who ventured into their basement, may have discovered one of Torbay’s best kept artistic secrets.

Hidden downstairs in an industrial looking workshop room, is the studio of emerging English Riviera artist William Mills, a young talent whose bold and expressive abstract style is capturing the attention of global collectors.

Now, following a successful Devon Open Studios, William is showcasing a new series of paintings that visitors to the event in September will have perhaps seen him embarking upon.

As well as featuring some of the towering evocative paintings that have typified his practice, for the first time he will also be exhibiting a collection of smaller studies that compliment these statement pieces. These scaled down works offer a new exploration of the multi-layered experience Mills’ looks to create; paintings that can be viewed as seascapes, skyscapes, or a world in between, are now revealed through a macro and micro lens.

‘I want viewers to be able to scour every detail of the canvas and never find any evidence of tools, brushwork or any form of deliberate human manipulation. It's an exhaustingly time-consuming process, slowly covering my tracks with layers upon layers of paint, but the reward when every inch of the painting has something interesting to say makes it so infinitely worth it.’