Pop art arrived with a big bang more than four decades ago, with imagery and motifs plucked from mass media and consumer culture. But hey, it's not as if we're all sitting around captive waiting to view more of the same-old cliched stuff that bores us to death in our everyday lives. The challenge for artists following the pop culture vernacular is to convert familiar motifs into their own visual language. That's why we noticed St. Petersburg artist David Williams when he exhibited a more delicate or lyrical form of pop in Cyanotypes: A Painterly Approach, at The Arts Center in St. Pete. Williams, represented by Boston's Kidder-Smith Gallery, traveled to Italy last year on a 2001-02 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Though intending to paint, he was attracted to a class in cyanotype, a mid-19th-century photo process. His resulting images have an entirely new look, a kind of lyrical expressionism. Though the artist still uses pop culture imagery, the work announces a new sensitive direction for this very accomplished artist.
