BELLA VISTA -- After living in several locations all over the country, Marzelle and Lee Williams followed their daughters to Northwest Arkansas and settled happily in Bella Vista.
They moved here in 2011, just in time to watch Crystal Bridges open.
Marzelle Williams describes herself as a semi-professional artist, although her sales were slowed significantly by covid-19. Some of the galleries where she shows her paintings are still closed and others have closed for good.
But she still paints.
"When I go into the studio and paint, I just focus on what's in front of me," she said. She describes painting as meditation.
She does portraits. Often she works from photographs she takes herself. Sometimes the photos are staged, but sometimes they're not. She has painted live models before, but that's often when she's part of a class or a workshop. It's the best way to learn about painting, she said.
She's tried abstracts and landscapes, but she always comes back to portraits in oils.
"It's my passion," she said.
Her subjects are often friends or family. She loves to let the subject's personality show through, such as when she painted a very young neighbor. The little girl had braids and pulled them over her eyes. Later, she had the braids bunched up around her ears. As if she was seeing no evil and hearing no evil, Williams said.
"I love people. I love to connect with people on a deeper level. That may be why I'm drawn to figurative and portrait," she said. It's very satisfying, she said, when her artwork connects with individuals.
When she first moved to Bella Vista, Williams showed her work in Kennedy Coffee. One piece started as a portrait of her granddaughter, but it became a portrait that could be any young child.
A man bought it and she learned later it reminded him of a child he had lost when he was a young man. With the portrait, he was able to tell his family about that experience for the very first time.
Another time when Williams was showing her work, she watched a woman looking at it with tears running down her face. The woman wasn't able to tell Williams exactly what touched her about the work, even when she came back a second time. A year later, the woman contacted Williams and bought some of the work that she had seen at the show.
"There's something about when you produce something that touches someone ... it's very rewarding," she said.
Although she's sorry the galleries have closed, staying home because of the pandemic hasn't been a problem for Williams.
"I'm kind of an isolationist, I guess," she said, "I'm not too bothered by the shutdown; it's not a whole lot different for me."
Both Marzelle and Lee Williams were born in Oklahoma. Lee Williams worked in the energy field, so they lived in Texas and Colorado. They raised their two daughters in Oklahoma, close to where they grew up.
Other than her artwork, Williams didn't have a career-type job. She worked as a phlebotomist for a while.
They came to Bella Vista when their daughter, Celeste, was raising her own children and working on a master's degree in nursing. She's now a nurse practitioner and the Democratic candidate for the 3rd Congressional District in Arkansas.
Williams' studio took over the space reserved for her husband's workshop, but he's all right with that, she said. He's developed an interest in gardening and wants to build a greenhouse. He grows vegetables while she grows flowers, she said.
Although she was once very involved in arena jumping with horses and agility training for dogs, she only has one dog left. He's older and blind and very dependent, she said.
"I'm his seeing-eye person," she said.
Lynn Atkins may be reached by email at [email protected].