Vivienne Williams was born in Swansea in 1955. She studied English Literature at Reading University, taking a masters degree in the subject "The Literary Response to the Visual Arts" in 1978.

She spent the next five years abroad - teaching English in Italy for two years and travelling via India and S.E. Asia to Australia. She lived in Sydney for two years working in an art gallery and began selling her work for the first time. She became interested in Tibetan Buddhism and, returning to the UK in 1983, decided to enter a Buddhist community. Here she attended teachings, meditation retreats, and helped run the centre. After seven years she decided that she must do what she had wanted to do all along - paint.

"Colour is the most important thing in my work. The surface texture becomes interesting as more paint is applied, energetically scratched, rubbed back and stained - the objects repainted and rearranged many times until the elements within the composition are balanced. At any moment during this process there is an opportunity for a painting to emerge."

Opening Speech By: Andrew Green,
Librarian, National Library of Wales

Two months ago I happened to hear a radio interview with the famous art critic David Sylvester (it had been recorded shortly before his death in early 2001). He was asked by the interviewer, John Tusa, what kind of experience it was to encounter a work of art. He replied, 'Somewhere between sex and prayer… no, both prayer and sex'. What he meant by 'sex', it turned out, was the immediate and instinctive physical response you make to a work of art: 'the thing grabs you at once, instantaneously … shatters you immediately'. (This explained, he went on to say, why some critics need to spend only a few moments looking, before moving on.) By 'prayer' he meant contemplation or concentration - the intense interrogation of the work.

This double reaction seems to me to be the normal and natural response to seeing a Vivienne Williams painting - especially if you see it in the midst of other, more mundane works, as happened to me in this gallery during the summer. There is to begin with an immediately recognisable, instant impact - followed by the need to immerse yourself in the picture over a lengthy period.

There is a tradition of Western art criticism, perhaps the dominant tradition, that concentrates on tracing the artist's development. There is nothing that a critic or writer likes better than to track dramatic changes in form or subject - and if possible link them to changes in the psychohistory of the artist. Some artists lend themselves to such an approach. A good example is Picasso. Books about the influence of this life on his art abound, the vogue at the moment being Picasso's women.

But this is a quite new preoccupation. Many artists were not particularly concerned with development, or for that matter with originality, but with other, more transcendent goals. Often, but by no means always, these are religious in nature. A topical example is Johannes Vermeer: many of you will have seen the great exhibition of his work this summer in the National Gallery.

Vivienne Williams belongs to second category of artist. In her work you'll find a constancy of purpose and theme over many years. It's pointless to search for massive changes in her subject matter or technique. The poppies dance across their friezes much as they did ten years ago. About the only innovation in her subject matter in this exhibition I can detect is the emergence of the watermelon - and I'm not sure whether how much can be made of that! (Vivienne will probably tell me there is a hidden significance to the watermelons. I'm often wrong: I once rashly wrote that a single 'landscape' might lead to a new theme in her work: needless to say, she's not produced a single landscape since!).

This consistency of intent and returning to beginnings mirrors Vivienne's own journeys: geographical journeys - she started in Swansea, and after spending time in Italy, south Asia, Australia and Germany, she again lives near Swansea; and also intellectual and spiritual journeys, from art to academic research to Tibetan Buddhism and back to practising art.

Instead of novelty-hunting, it seems to me to make much more sense to look hard at the things that always seem to have meant so much to Vivienne - and to us who look at her work.

First, colour. In Vivienne's words, colour is 'the most important thing in my work'. I suppose it's the very special nature of her colours that first draws people to her paintings. The range of colours is wide - gorgeous wine reds, sharp tangy lemons, deep greens. But there is no colour that's been let loose from the tube and that hits the picture raw. Every colour has been thought through and worked on - maybe even expunged and repainted. This is how one of Vivienne's favourite painters, Howard Hodgkin, also works. Even if his sweeps and counter-sweeps and dots and splodges of colour look spontaneous and unplanned, it is not so: look at the label and you see that the painting took several years.

(Paradoxically, in this exhibition it's the colours that are virtually drained of colour that seem to hold the strongest emotional charge.)

Second comes form. These are of the simplest: a frieze, or two rectangles, or three curvilinear shapes, separated. (Notice that Vivienne's shapes talk to each other, but they don't hold hands). The important thing about them is that they're not bloodless and abstracted, like the shapes Ben Nicholson spend decades constructing. They're all alive. The jugs lean, the pears wink at each other, the tulips bow, the rhododendrons flare up like fires.

And third, texture. Texture is very special to Vivienne's art. It's impossible to capture in reproduction, even on the two excellent pictures on the invitation to this exhibition. If the colours are hard-won and the forms carefully shaped, the surface of each painting is the final result of a reworking process that can take days or weeks or even years. Some sheets of paper are kept for five years or more. Vivienne has described what happens: as it builds up successive textures of paint and scratchings, 'ordinary paper takes on the appearance and weight of old leather'. The textures, like the colours, vary. Some are distant and hermetic, like the strange hieroglyphics in 'Tulips in green bowl' (Vivienne says these are derived from Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts). Others seem to mirror the subject, like the thin and delicately veined skins of paper laid on the surface to suggest the leaves or petals of flowers. Very often there are multiple layers visible, with paint or outline shapes showing through from another work, or an earlier version of the present one.

Put these three elements together - colour, forms and textures - and you have a Vivienne Williams painting. But the alchemy needed to fuse them is precisely what's so hard to put a finger on in mere words.

So you are reduced to silence. Like the bad art critic that I am, I'm driven back to talking about the artist. Vivienne is a rewarding artist to talk to. She speaks, for example, about the hard work of disengaging brain and suspending critical faculties when working on a painting; or about the sense of relief and exhaustion she feels after a long period of concentrating on producing work.

Vivienne is one of the least demonstrative people I know. Yet her work, though it doesn't shout, does demand attention - and it deserves a large audience.

If there was any justice in the world, all these paintings would leap off the walls within a day, and Vivienne would be sentenced to another long period of painful hibernation and the production of more pictures. It's unfortunate that, despite recent success, she is still so little known, even in Wales, when her work has a quality and a universality that should appeal to people everywhere. She is still too much of a well-kept secret.

I read recently the draft of the National Assembly's cultural strategy, 'A platform for fulfilment'. It says, 'If any area of the professional arts needs a complete overhaul in Wales, it is the visual arts'. There is too little critical debate about visual art, the network of exhibition spaces is too modest, and the marketing of art is woeful. Let's hope the Assembly can stimulate improvements, so that not just Swansea, and not just Wales or the rest of Britain, but the whole world can learn about and celebrate the work of the important painter that Vivienne is.

To finish, three wishes. Congratulations to David and Sandy for staging such a wonderful show. The Attic Gallery has been supporting Vivienne for over ten years, and continues to show faith in her work. Congratulations to Vivienne, for a show that contains work at least as good as, and I would say better than, any she's done before. Finally, I urge you to look hard at these paintings. Whether with a sexual fervour or a rapt devotion doesn't matter. They're here to be enjoyed.

Andrew Green