Gail Elizabeth Williams, painter of contemporary realism, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received a law degree in 1983 and started practicing law thereafter. She studied with accomplished artists such as Frank Acurri, Gregg Kreutz, David Leffel and Mctavish Kaplan. She’s shown her work at various private venues in New York, as well as juried competitions (receiving Honorable Mention in 1998) with Arts Into Action and The Gallery at the George Washington Bridge.
Editor’s note for Gail Elizabeth Williams
Gail, at six feet plus, is an imposing figure. We’ve been friends for over twenty years with similar interests: I take African dance classes, she used to perform in an African dance company; I do yoga, she teaches yoga; I like to look at paintings, she paints. Our granddaughter lived with us; Gail and her husband have taken in foster children for years and adopted a daughter. I had a heart attack and got a stent, she has had multiple heart issues. She and her brother together are a force of nature, coming from a childhood in the 1960s in a Bed-Stuy Brooklyn apartment with holes in the wall and raw, unfinished, splintery wood flooring, to earning a J.D. for her and PhD for him. But their style and approach are a study in contrasts: her oil paintings are figurative, people and still lifes with glorious colors and his pen and ink drawings are also figurative, but neoclassic and brazen; her humor is light and witty, his is wry and biting. Gail exudes compassion and sensitivity Tony radiates sarcasm and irony. Both are terrific artists, mighty intellects, and have a serenity and joy that is contagious.
Jan Schmidt
Gail Elizabeth Williams Interviewed by Jan Schmidt
Schmidt
Where would you like to begin about your life as an artist? Chronologically or start with your life now?
Williams
I would like to tell this like a story. I don’t remember ever not drawing. Even though I paint now, I love drawing. When I was a little girl, I used to draw all the time. My mother brought us crayons, because she had five of us. So to keep us quiet, she brought crayons and coloring books and we were always engaged in that.
As a young child to teenager, I used to draw cartoons, but not whimsical cartoons, cartoons with relationships. There was this song, I forgot the name of it, but it was the woman telling the guy, “I’m not gonna be that kind of woman and you ain’t gonna do this to me.” I drew a cartoon with the woman waving her finger saying, “I’m not gonna be that kind of woman.” My sister used to laugh at me and say, “Oh, your cartoons are like people doing stuff.” She meant kissing. This was pre-high school into high school. I didn’t really show my friends. It was just something I showed my family. We all drew, except for the twins. Tony, my baby sister, and I used to draw and compete with each other. Tony was oldest, then me, then the twins, then our sister Trina.
Schmidt
So you started out cartooning. Do you do that anymore? Have you got any desire to?
Williams
Sometimes I think about doing children’s books. But those cartoons were more like the Archie cartoons, but a little bit more sophisticated—my girls all had big butts and big boobs and the men had Afros and muscles. I wish I would have saved some. I didn’t have the presence of mind, with all the stuff that was going on, to do that. My favorite was the kiss. I would have the characters turned into the kiss. I’m still romantic. My art is still romantic. I just made that connection.
Schmidt
You call it contemporary realism. So this was going on you said while everything else was going on in your life at that time. What was that like?
Williams
A lot of dysfunction in the family. Parents fighting. There was a lot of love, but there was also tension. There was no doubt they loved us. They told us, we knew it. My father was always there. Even when they broke up, he moved around the corner. I saw him every day. He opened a restaurant across the street. He was never far. He opened a fish and chips place called Black T’s Fish and Chips. It was in in Bed-Stuy. His restaurant was on Tompkins Avenue and we lived on Gates Avenue. Then he opened up an ice cream store. This was the sixties and seventies Bed-Stuy, not the current Bed-Stuy. Not gentrified Bed-Stuy. It was a very rough neighborhood. My dad was known and he was respected. He also ran numbers. So he was a street guy; everybody knew him, everybody knew us. Then he opened the restaurant and even the police used to go to his restaurant to buy, because he made some good fish and chips. I don’t know how long it lasted. At seventeen, I left to move to Miami and it was still there, maybe a couple of years after that. But he did other ventures. He opened up an after-hours spot called Club Watergate.
Schmidt
Did you go to Club Watergate?
Williams
He would not let me. That’s how I got money from him. I would walk in, he would give me money to leave. I would say, “Daddy, do you have a couple of dollars?” “Yeah, here, here, here,” because he wanted me out. He didn’t want me hanging around Club Watergate.
Schmidt
What did your mom do? Besides have five kids.
Williams
In the beginning, she was a stay-at-home mom. Then she worked at Schrafft’s. Very high-end restaurant, on Fifth Avenue on Madison. She was a short-order cook. I used to go there to see her. She would be so proud. I don’t remember if I went while I was in college or I went while I was in law school, but she was there for a good while. Then they closed, and then she continued to work at this restaurant chain—I forget the name of the chain—that took over in New York and they closed all those good restaurants. But it was so rough for her. They were like assembly-line employers. At the same time, my uncle was starting a business, her twin brother. He was starting a business, and he just wanted to give her a job and some money. She was like—I guess you would say office manager. Yeah, that’s what they would call it now, office manager. His company was called Wise, Inc. They did computers. He was a computer whiz.
Schmidt
So at seventeen, things were blowing up around you and you split to Florida?
Williams
I was going with this guy who was totally inappropriate. My mother hated that I was with him, and it was causing a lot of problems. She was afraid, she would say to me, “If you stay with this guy, I’m afraid they’re going to kill him and they’re going to kill you.”
And then one night I had a dream that I was running and people were shooting at me and him and I woke up really shaken. I went to school maybe the next day, and some people were giving a speech about getting a grant to go to college. I was sitting there in a daydream, but then I heard them talk about the basic opportunity grant, you could go to college with this. I raised my hand and I said, “If I get this grant, would I be able to go to college outside of New York?” because something told me I needed to leave. After that dream and the torment it was doing to my mother, something said, “You need to leave.” They said, “Oh, yeah, you can go all over the country.”
I wanted to do court stenography at the time, and I found a two-year college in Miami, and two months after I left, the guy was killed. He was murdered with a woman.
Schmidt
Wow, a miracle that you got out. So is that where you started your law direction?
Williams
I started doing court stenography. I did not go to class; I just played around. I joined a dance group, a traditional West African dance group, and I danced all over Florida, Miami. After I realized that this wasn’t working, a year later, I came home. I enrolled in John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and I became this serious student. From John Jay, I went to law school. I always wanted to do it, but I didn’t think I was smart enough. I had no examples.
When I told my mother I wanted to do this, she thought I was crazy. She supported me, but she was always shaken and nervous. We were living in the projects and me, my mother, and my sister shared a room, the twins shared a room, and Tony had his own room. When I got into law school, she wanted me to have privacy to study. She gave me the master bedroom, my sister moved into the living room, Tony slept on the floor in the dining area, and the twins had their own room, and she had the small room. Everybody just threw the whole house around so that I could go to law school.
Schmidt
That was a lot of pressure, though. You graduated from law school in 1983. Did you continue painting and drawing during this time?
Williams
What I used to do—and a friend of mine, when I started painting, reminded me of this. I did not continue to draw, but if we were out for dinner, I would take the placemats and take out a pen and draw faces. A friend of mine said, “You know, remember when you used to draw those faces?” I would just doodle a lot and didn’t even think about it. I didn’t think about it until my mother died and I was in such despair. She died of pancreatic cancer and she was only 56. Tony said to me, “You know, Gail, remember when you used to draw?”
I said, “Yeah, that was so long ago.”
He said, “But I think that calms you down. So why don’t you get back into it so that you can deal with the grief.” And that’s what started me doing it. I did all my own for a while and then I started studying with other artists.
I started practicing law in ‘83. I prosecuted child abuse cases, represented people in housing court, and then I represented the New York City hospitals. I was their lawyer. Then from there, I started teaching. I still teach. I taught at Baruch, and at some point I was adjuncting, and then I went to New York City College of Technology, where I am now, and then I became tenured there and associate professor.
Schmidt
So in the course of this time, you began studying painting and thinking about it as something that was helping you go through your grieving process.
Williams
I started showing my work and I won a few awards.
Schmidt
Then in the meantime, you also became a yoga person and instructor? And you started taking in foster children?
Willliams
Yes. And another love of mine was photography. When I’m not painting, I take my camera and I go into New York and I take pictures. Street photography, same with my paintings. I love people and people in action, people doing stuff.
I’m sixty-seven and people keep asking me when I’m going to retire. I don’t know. I work at home, so I’m not doing the hard getting-to-the-job thing. And I love teaching. I think all of that speaks to the love for creativity. That wasn’t there when I was practicing law. I was a trial lawyer and I loved doing that. When I worked at the hospitals, it was more transactional. I didn’t like that as much as being in the courtroom. I’m sorry I made that change. You know, those are one of the things I wish I hadn’t made that transition, but it happens. I made the transition because I had burnt out. So instead of just taking leave, which is what people do, I took another job. Poor choices for me at the time. Maybe not, because I wouldn’t have been here if I had done that.
And I’ve been married to Nathaniel for twenty-five years in August. He’s retired and he was a high school teacher. I did a stint in high school. I taught high school for about five years. I taught Spanish and law. My Spanish is rusty, but I speak enough to be able to get through when I’m in a foreign country. But if you don’t use it, you lose it, but every time I get into a Spanish-speaking environment, I’m able to do it. Do I understand when they start talking fast? No, I just ask them to slow it down a little bit.
Nate said this to me once that I was a restless spirit, but not in a negative way, just that I’ve got to be involved in doing this and traveling and he said, “You’re such a restless spirit.” I was like, wow, that really describes me. When my sister died at fifty-four of uterine and ovarian cancer, the painting was a great outlet again.
Schmidt
So, O Great Restless Spirit, you sure accomplish a lot.
Williams
Today, after this interview, I have to work to do. I wrote a textbook a number of years ago, “Civil Practice and Procedure for Paralegals in New York.” I’m updating it, so the publisher is on me to get it done. And I’d like to mention that a year or so ago, I also did the artwork for Anthony Howell’s book, The African Diaspora in Arts and Culture from A to Z.
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