Aubrey Williams’s vibrant paintings and drawings merge American and European abstraction with Guyanese cultural traditions. A leading figure among the influx of Caribbean artists to London in the post-Colonial period, he began making art at the age of five. He developed a stronger artistic voice in his early twenties, when his work as an agronomist brought him into extended contact with the Warao people in the Guyanese rainforest. “I started to understand what art really is,” he says of this experience. In the early 1950s, he relocated to London, where he became a founding member of the influential Caribbean Artists Movement (est. 1966). By this time, Williams was widely exhibiting his work and garnering acclaim for compositions that encompassed such diverse subjects as abstract interpretations of Shostakovich’s symphonies; detailed depictions of rainforest birds; and lush fields of Olmec, Maya, and Warao symbolic imagery.