March 11, 2025

Ron Williams: Folk Art as Ground Truthing

Elaine and Archie / Folk Art, Painting Tremclad paint /

Through ground truthing, Ron Williams transforms his forestry experiences into vivid—and hefty— brilliant Tremclad folk paintings.

Ron Williams calls his vibrant folk paintings of landscapes, animals, and plants ground truthing—a term borrowed from his years as a forestry technician. “You can’t know a piece of land from an aerial photo,” he says. “You must actually get feet on the ground, walk around on it.” For Ron, painting is a way to ground truth his own experiences, memories, and decades of hiking and paddling thousands of kilometres around Alberta and Nova Scotia.

Completely Self Taught

In true folk art tradition, Ron is completely self-taught. He didn’t start painting until he retired in 2016 and says he has no idea where it came from–and no idea where it’s going. He says no one in his family had even a shred of creativity and confesses that at first he couldn’t even draw. “I don’t mind admitting that I traced. I couldn’t draw anything then. I don’t do it anymore, because I found, amazingly, as you do more, eventually you learn how to sketch and draw.”

Much of his progress is due to the sheer hard work of painting every day, all day, but also from a forced solitude. His partner, Karen Roy, is American and must return south for six months each year. They live in West Arichat on Isle Madame, off the southeastern corner of Cape Breton, and during the pandemic, he was without her for 21 months—a long time to be alone.

An Artist in Demand

But his work has gotten so good that in 2023, he was accepted at the province’s most important folk art event, the annual Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival in Lunenburg, NS, and has been invited back twice, including this August. He also has a solo show this June (2025) at the Chester Arts Centre in Chester, south of Halifax, as well as one at the Eltuek Arts Centre in Sydney. And on the west side of Cape Breton, he’s in talks for a show at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts.

Maps, skulls, books, videos, photos, paintings, computer: everything is neat and orderly, unlike the riot of his paintings. It is a kind of portrait of the artist.

A Strange Choice of Medium

But he’s chosen an unusual medium for a serious artist: He works with Tremclad rust paint on used tent canvas stretched over either salvaged boards or over old wooden window frames. Why?

It started with an imaginative exercise inspired by his decades working in remote areas. “I just thought, okay, you’re an old guy out in the woods doing whatever, (say) trapping. You’ve got no resources. You can’t get to town, but you want to decorate your cabin. So you go to the shed, and you see what you got out there.” What Ron had was a huge old outfitter’s tent, a bunch of old wooden window frames, and Tremclad paint.

Because of the nature of the rust paint, he can’t let colours mix or blend; instead, he might use layering or Pointillism techniques which allow the observer’s eyes to blend the colour. And because Tremclad doesn’t come in that many colours he has a limited palette. But Tremclad is bright, which makes his work vivid, colourful, and full of contrast.

folk painting of a stream in the woods with wild life

This Wetlands painting is a perfect example of his style and it’s the one he’s most proud of—so far. It’s a compilation of many of the wetlands he’s known intimately, full of motion and life, down to the ticks, ladybugs, and caterpillars that sit on the edges of leaves.

In the undulating band of water, there are speckled and brook trout swimming by as if in a parade; and there in the corner, you can see a spotted sandpiper strutting on the beach. Look closely and you’ll be rewarded with glimpses of delightful creatures like the yellow-spotted and red-backed salamanders, frogs, as well as flying insects like the dragonfly and butterfly. And all of this on a background of flowers arranged like a mosaic, with distinct patches of colour blending together.

A collector from the U.S. is interested in purchasing Wetlands, but for Ron it’s more than a monetary transaction for Ron. “I will not sell these big ones (paintings) to anyone who is not prepared to sit down and get the entire story about them, about the experience that led to that painting, and the understanding of why it’s important to me.” He says, “I remember individual trees that are special in these areas, let alone the whole painting and its flowers.”

Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder

As you can imagine, after 40 years working as a forestry technician, Ron has amassed a lot of wonderful stories about the natural environment. But in the last couple of decades, he says the unnecessary destruction of the natural world has left him with what he calls “post-traumatic embitterment disorder.” Black humour, perhaps—the kind nurses and doctors resort to for coping with the uncopable—in this case, watching precious environments sacrificed for greed. Another term for it might be ecological grief.

He says, “Political interference and influence, and pandering to industry with no transparency or accountability,” has led to clearcutting being ramped up in a major way since 2000, and he wants to tell that story. He wants to paint his truth—a truth that contains some humorous but sharp criticisms, like the painting Trees of Nova Scotia.

The clear-cut that broke his heart, though, was near Guysborough, Nova Scotia. “It was a big open stand of old growth hardwoods. It was parkland, and waist high ferns all underneath. And in the Spring there was nothing but spring beauties and lilies. But it’s gone.”

He reacted through art. “You’re going to cut it down? I’ll build it back up, and that’s it right there,” he says speaking about paintings similar to the spirit that Tracadie Hardwoods below was painted. “That’s in memoriam to that stand. But in doing that, it also represents all the different trees I’ve seen that I liked.”

Tracadie Hardwoods: There is not a square inch of any of his paintings that he hasn’t laboured over, especially the large ones. Patient, methodical, and careful, he starts in one corner and then paints all of one kind of flower or element before moving on to the next. “I can sit there and paint dots or white flowers for hours. But I have learned to do them neatly the first time so you don’t have to go back and fix things.”

Ron eventually left his job at the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources because, as a forestry tech, he felt complicit in that destruction since the department existed to serve industry.

He transferred to Protected Areas which was part of the Department of the Environment where he believed that he could do some good. He worked there for 18 years until 2020 and says he can point to many areas he had a hand in placing on the protected list. However, he’s not naive. He says protected areas can be unprotected and there are entities that are relentless about getting those areas developed.

But he says, “It’s not my problem anymore. It’s a terrible thing to say.” Still, he’s grateful for all the opportunities being a forestry technician gave him to experience so much of what many will never see. “I got to see wild rivers, and hiked and climbed the mountains; and the mountains up there (Alberta) are just amazing. Ridge walks, you know, I did all these things. And I never would have done that without that job.”

Burnt Timber Fire Lookout, Alberta: This is one of our favourites. There is not a cloud in the sky, and the Rocky Mountains are in the background. The mountain caribou wander through an alpine meadow, unconcerned with the viewer being in their space. Ron says these lookouts were magical places where one could see not just caribou, but mule deer, moose, and grizzlies. The animals, the carpet of flowers, and the patience and care taken to paint them attest to Ron’s desire to convey the abundance of what was once common up there.

Mining Memories

“I can’t get out to do what I did five years ago, ten years ago. I’m stuck at home and, just simply, I’m mining those memories.” He says he has a whole treasure trove of ideas from all those years, all those miles, and all those photos. Checking out his Instagram feed you’ll see scores of his folk paintings stating his truth of the woods, lakes, bogs and beaches (and bears) he’s seen and he still has many ideas for more.

And he says he’s just now starting to get into his Alberta years; he was born in Red Deer. He says, “Now, I’m teaching myself how to paint mountains.”

As we’re leaving, Archie feels the need to take a shot of his workbench in the entryway. He did not build a new workshop as a younger aspiring artist might have done. He made use of what he had, a corner of a very small room that must also accommodate the firewood for the stove in the kitchen.

Over his workbench there are some of his earliest works displayed prominently for visitors. They are the other extreme of the riot of colour and detail of his later work.

But reflecting on his growth as an artist, he says, “I’d like to go back to the innocence a little bit. The original simplicity.”

Perhaps this will be a cycle of reducing things down to essentials, to another level of ground truthing. Perhaps it could be an antidote for embitterment disorder. “I’m painting my truth and it’s more about the good than the bad.”

Pink Wintergreen: Here is a recent stylized painting of a Pink Wintergreen plant, reminiscent of traditional botanical illustrations but simplified. Bold. He says, ‘I’ll never be a realist,’ but the plant is accurate enough for one to identify its living counterpart—or is it a truth about the plant he’s captured?

A Ron Williams Gallery

Decommissioning of the Tern Rock Lighthouse: The house is on fire, burned rather than left in dangerous disrepair. A burning building, even a condemned one, is alarming to humans, but this one is part of the background. In fact, the birds are the main event, and they are depicted with the same kind of energy as the flames. Nature—all nature—in Ron’s paintings often has this alarming energy.

Ribbon Snake in Grass and Flowers: When we arrived to interview Ron the second time, Ribbon Snake was a work in progress, with a bright, coiled body patterned like African textile, drawing the eye to the centre where a realistic head, open-mouthed, consumes a robin’s egg. He added a hornet later.

Birdwatching Beach Bear: Bears are another of his favourite subjects, partly because he’s seen so many, but also because when he was starting out, it was the simplest animal to draw, being somewhat amorphous. This one appears to be looking back at the viewer who, if not alarmed by the bear, may have been caught up looking at everything there is to see in the background—including what looks like a yellow rubber duck.

Two Mounties Running on the Beach: While a spoof on Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach, there is another layer to this painting. Of course, it’s amusing to see the lighthearted, frolicking national police officers, but they are on a beach—a natural environment. For Ron, there is an ambiguity here. These Mounties are in uniform, so they are protecting the beach, but for whom? Is it for citizens to enjoy and appreciate, or so developers can profit from it?

Beach: This is a composite of beaches Ron has been on, specifically the south shore of Nova Scotia. “I spent a lot of time in the 90s monitoring piping plovers. I did it for ten years,” he says. “The other shore birds are just stuff you’d see along with the piping plover during the nesting season.”

Bear on a Chair: Painting furniture has been a staple of folk art since the beginning. This bear looks a little worried about his situation, though, but those claws should make the sitter conscious of how awe-inspiring real bears are.

Flintstone Barrens: If you ask about any of his landscapes, you’ll get a deep, satisfying—and educational—explanation of the terrain rather than just a location. He says, “That’s what’s called the Flintstone Barrens all along this river, the Shelburne. The area is basically a large glacial plain with very little soil on it. And because there’s not a lot of drainage, you have these large bogs—successional bogs—going from wet all the way up to shrub bogs or tree bogs. In the fall, that’s what those barrens look like. They turn orange or red. And you get those wonderful colours from the huckleberries and the blueberries.”

As a forestry technician, map reading was a critical skill of the trade, but now each map tells a story—or at least triggers memories. Sometimes he’ll copy a piece of a map related to a painting and glue it to the back of the piece. Over time, these maps have shifted from guiding his work in the forest to becoming part of the work itself.

Tobeatic Lake Warden Cabin: Cabins found in the wild are a theme in Ron’s work, both as a painter and as a forestry technician. “I was there,” he often declares. It echoes that impulse—even those of us who grew up in the city have it—when, as children, we found a little patch of wilderness in our neighbourhood where we could build a fort.