Some artists’ work is discussed for its ability to create entire worlds, this is admirable, but Scott Williams’s artists’ books and paintings operate with a far more stellar cosmology. Williams creates parallel galaxies and universes and even new dimensions of space/time. To gaze into a Scott Williams piece is to go down a wormhole of existencil California psychedelia.

Down and out on Shotwell and 20th frisco 1989 – 2016 is a unique sketchbook of the GOAT Stencil Pirate Godfather Scott Williams. The entrancing compositions oscillate from the sanctification of Western Pan-Americana icons to profoundly complex and moody ‘abstractions’. The book is made with a generous spectrum of styles ranging from austere stencil cut and airbrushed paintings to expressionistic gestural painting rarely seen outside of larger canvases. Williams is flexing all his painterly muscles here but beyond this cavalcade is a decades-long oblique and powerful autobiographical narrative of an artist losing his eyesight and his patience with the world as it stands while maintaining his unique vision of the world as it spins. The book is a singular window into the creative process of an enigmatic artist.

This is one of the last 7 available unique painted books from Scott’s personal collection.