London Geese

Egyptian geese stroll about a background of scrubbed pinks and greens, and among them sit two apples and a wide white bowl on a saucer. The birds are not arranged into any single scene. They face different directions, some cropped by the edges, one poking its head down at nothing in particular, as though the artist gathered a page of park sketches and let them share the same board. That mix of living creatures and kitchen table objects is the joke and the pleasure of it: the apples are roughly the size of the geese, and the bowl sits in the middle like a pond nobody is using.

Ella Williams is a contemporary British painter who works in this loose, thickly brushed way, closer to the Post-Impressionist tradition of colour and flat pattern than to careful wildlife illustration. The geese themselves are worth knowing about. Egyptian geese were brought to Britain centuries ago as ornamental birds for grand estates, escaped, and have since made themselves thoroughly at home in London parks, where they bicker with the ducks and ignore passersby. Their chestnut eye patches and pink legs are unmistakable, and Williams catches them with a few confident strokes, letting the pink underpainting show through the bodies so the birds seem lit from within.