August 5, 2024
Artists

Scott Williams, ‘greatest of all stencil artists,’ dies at 67


It was the early ‘90s and the Mission was boiling, fermenting with artists from all over the world. At least that’s how Clarion Alley’s Project co-founder Aaron Noble recalls it — an artistic melting pot. And one of the premier artists at the time — a painter fueled by coffee, tobacco and burritos — was spray painting institution Scott Williams.

Williams, who lived at his apartment at 20th and Shotwell for 35 years, died Sunday, May 26, at San Francisco General Hospital. He was 67 and succumbed to an infection, according to his family. 

Williams was one of the first artists to paint a mural in Clarion Alley after Noble and other artists started the project in 1991, Noble said. The two cultivated a friendship that lasted through the ‘90s before Noble moved to Los Angeles in 2000.

“His work was everywhere, literally out on the street and indoors and outdoors, on cars driving by. You couldn’t avoid it,” said Noble. “He was a stencil artist. He was the stencil artist. He was the greatest of all stencil artists.”

Some of Williams’ stencil pieces sat at local favorites, such as Burger Joint, Leather Tongue Video, Pedal Revolution, Chameleon Bar, Armadillo’s on Fillmore, DNA Lounge, Amoeba Records and The Lab. Mission Local found that his painting at The Lab was the only one remaining.

Scott William's piece inside of The Lab on Friday June 7, 2024. Photo by Oscar Palma.
Scott William’s piece inside of The Lab on Friday June 7, 2024. Photo by Oscar Palma.

Williams started using stencil in the early ‘80s when he cut images from magazine images and glued them on pages of a notebook.  

“I had this idea in the back of my mind, ‘What if I was to take a photograph and cut out all the dark parts and spray paint through that? I wonder how that would look.’ I remember thinking about that for several months,” said Williams in the 1991 documentary Spraypaint. “I thought this might not work, so I won’t spend much time on it and I just did it really quickly and sprayed it once and I was surprised how well it came out.”

Williams was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Santa Barbara. He arrived in San Francisco in 1979 and started doing stencil work shortly afterward. He received the 2005 Adeline Kent Award, which recognizes promising artists in the state, and his work has been featured at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Image of one of Scott William's pieces. Photo courtesy of Robert Collison.
Image of one of Scott William’s pieces. Photo courtesy of Robert Collison.

After more than a decade using spray paint, Williams switched to an airbrush machine in the early to mid ‘90s because the latter was less toxic, some of his friends said. Toward the end of his life, he returned to making collages in books.



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