STEWART WILLIAMS:HIS WORLSD AND HIS ART text by William Corbett

Pressed Wafer, 2017 First edition, 127 pp., 10" X 11" Hardcover

Fine

Art. Literary Nonfiction. Stuart Williams had, in the words of his older brother Frank, "a mystical connection with animals." He dreamed of becoming a farmer, but having learned to draw at the age of six he became an artist, in his teens showing his work in venues throughout his hometown, Peterborough, New Hampshire. He traveled to Switzerland, the home of his beloved Toggenburg goats, and to Kenya, Tanzania, and the Serengeti plains. He read avidly about animals, domestic and wild, and watched all the documentary films on animals he could find. "Each of his drawings suggests," the Boston Globe's art critic Sebastian Smee has written, "an enviably deep, somehow magical identification with animals." Williams is that rare artist who worked under the constraints, physical and mental, of an incurable genetic disorder-Prader-Willi syndrome. He had the remarkable luck of being born into the right family in the right place, and he honed that with an art that transcended the impossible odds of his birth.