Williams's mother had trained as a painter in Paris and passed on her enthusiasm to her son, who also painted in his early years.[31] A painting by him now hangs in Yale University's Beinecke Library[32] and as late as 1962 he was still remembering in an interview that "I'd like to have been a painter, and it would have given me at least as great a satisfaction as being a poet."[33] For most of his life Williams wrote art criticism and introductions to exhibitions by his friends.
In 1915, Williams began to associate with the New York group of artists and writers known as "The Others."[34] Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and the artist Man Ray, they included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Orrick Glenday Johns and Marcel Duchamp. Interlocking with them were the US artists who met at Arensburg's studio, including Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, with whom Williams developed close friendships.
Although he championed the new way of seeing and representation pioneered by the European avant-garde, Williams and his artistic friends wished to get away from what they saw as a purely derivative style. As one result, he started Contact magazine with Hartley in 1920 in order to create an outlet for works showcasing the belief that creative work should derive from the artist's direct experience and sense of place and reject traditional notions of how this should be done.[35]
Precisionism emerged in response to such thinking. In her study of the influence of painting on Williams, Ruth Grogan devoted several paragraphs to the dependency of some of his poems on the paintings of Charles Sheeler in this style, singling out in particular the description of a power house in Williams's "Classic Scene".[36] But the close relationship with Charles Demuth was more overt. Williams's poem "The Pot of Flowers" (1923) references Demuth's painting "Tuberoses" (1922), which he owned. On his side, Demuth created his "I saw the figure 5 in gold" (1928) as a homage to Williams's poem "The Great Figure" (1921). Williams's collection Spring and All (1923) was dedicated to the artist and, after his early death, he dedicated the long poem "The Crimson Cyclamen." (1936) to Demuth's memory.
Later collaborations with artists include the two poem/ two drawing volume that he shared with William Zorach in 1937[37] and his poem "Jersey Lyric", written in response to Henry Niese's 1960 painting of the same title:[38]
View of winter trees before one tree in the foreground where by fresh-fallen snow lie 6 woodchunks ready for the fire
Throughout his career, Williams thought of his approach to poetry as a painterly deployment of words, saying explicitly in an interview, "I've attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing….A design in the poem and a design in the picture should make them more or less the same thing."[39] However, in the case of his references to much earlier painters, culminating in Pictures from Brueghel (1962), his approach was more commentarial. Of this late phase of his work it has been claimed that "Williams saw these artists solving, in their own ways, the same problems that concerned him,"[40] but his engagement with them was at a distance.
