David Williams is a Dallas native. Raised in the would-be bohemian neighborhood of 1980's Oak Cliff, his childhood was peppered with drive-by Tejano music, Bocci ball tournaments, drag queens, and mustachioed poets. His artistic playground included a family-owned beauty salon, the local silkscreen studio, and a Catholic icon tienda, places where dark humor and quirky fashion defined an avant-garde art scene. Interaction with local artists like Pam Nelson, Randy Brodnax, and Arthello Beck helped David legitimize art both as a hobby and a calling.
David spent summers in the Texas Panhandle and worked as a ranch hand before graduating with a BA from Saint Louis University. There he found oil painting. He received his MEd with a concentration in psychology from SMU. For the last nineteen years he has worked in education as a high school counselor and art teacher at Jesuit Dallas. In that time he has helped coordinate exhibitions with the Jesuit Dallas Museum and exhibited work in Dallas and Amarillo.
His paintings, primarily in oil and watercolor, search for the personality of a place, often focusing on isolated people and structures to define larger crowded environments. Recent work includes series from the Texas Panhandle, the Gulf Coast, and old Oak Cliff: places where the authentic, the marginalized, and the wandering tend to congregate.