Allen Williams

The American illustrator and concept artist tells Gary Evans how he teases out imagery from his subconscious using prose and poetry

- Gary Evans

Allen Williams moved around a lot when he was younger. A month here, six weeks there. In total, he attended more than 20 high schools.

His dad’s job meant they were often on the road. They lived in small rental apartments or hotels, Allen’s “most relied-upon distractions” became reading and drawing. “The easiest things to come by were paper and pencils,” the artist says. “They were nomad-friendly endeavours. I think the immersion into various genres of fiction coupled with the fact that I travelled so much combined to make me someone who spends a lot of time in my own world.”

And what a world. Allen’s art comes crawling off the page at you: weird monochrome figures, the human and the human-like. Something is always going on in his work, some story simmering away under the surface. Maybe a bit of free association too. Perhaps it’s something in his subconscious that sees all those weird faces staring out at him from the graphite dust that he piles on to the page. His job is to tease them out. The result is occasionally dreamy, fantastical, but more often than not it’s dark and unsettling. Allen believes his love for this dark world is a fire illuminating it.

THE COLLEGE DROPOUT

Allen got into comic books before he could read. He remembers staring at the pictures for hours at a time. Long after becoming a capable reader, he continued to follow the stories through the pictures alone.

He liked horror and read William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist when he was seven. Allen found even the most horrific of horror plots “much less worrisome” than real life. He also trained in martial arts, specialising in the Shotokan style of karate. “It made me less… breakable. I loved to fight when I was younger.”