Evelyn Williams was an artist of fierce determination and tenacity, working every day, all day, until the last few weeks of her life. In the eloquent and revealing studio workbooks she kept over these last years, she once observed: “I take on the emotional lives of the people I invent... hoping by getting under their skin and becoming part of them I shall be able to release them from their suffering.” She put on occasional, critically acclaimed, shows at major public spaces such as the Whitechapel, Ikon, Mead and Sheffield art galleries, interspersed with long periods of silence . Collectors, though, remained constant, and many of them became friends.Never achieving the public or critical profile of such contemporaries as Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach or Paula Rego, she was none the less an artist who spoke with an unmistakable directness and warmth of feeling. At times visionary, feminist, Romantic and apocalyptic, she was essentially an acute and highly sympathetic observer of people and their attempts to relate to one another. [The Telegraph] Evelyn Williams is remembered for her introspective large-scale drawings and reliefs. Born in London to Welsh parents, Williams spent substantial parts of her life living in Wales, including as part of her time at the unconventional Summerhill boarding-school (1932–44). Following her art education at St Martin’s School of Art (1944–7) and the Royal College of Art (1947–50), Williams first attracted acclaim for her portraits of children. She moved towards greater three-dimensionality in the 1960s and large reliefs from the mid-1970s. Controversy surrounded her success in the John Moores Exhibition (1961) because she had entered the paper maché relief as a painting, but won the sculpture prize. Common subjects include crowds, sleeping figures, and whirlpools. Distance – whether between self-image and reality, the individual and the crowd – often informs her work, which can perhaps relate to her lamentations about Summerhill being a time of ‘sadness, a sense of loss, of being outside.’ A selection of her writing and work was posthumously compiled into the book Evelyn Williams Works and Words (Omnific: London, 1998) by Derek Birdsall and Bruce Bernard (eds).