Expressionist painter and printmaker Deborah Williams Remington creates hard-edge abstractions that suggest a wide variety of subject matter including Japanese calligraphy, automobile parts, and bones of human beings.  Her work reflects two ongoing influences, which are her several years spent in the Orient studying calligraphy and her immersion in action painting when she was a student in San Francisco.

Remington was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey, where her father was a stockbroker and her mother an intelligent person who had much association with illustrators.  Her father died when she was young, and the family went to California where she attended high school in Pasadena.  She enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute and became part of the Bay Area Figurative movement, the West Coast version of New York's Abstract Expressionism.  Teachers included David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Clyfford Still, leaders of the Bay Area style.

Becoming part of the Beatnik scene, she ran the Six Gallery with several other artists, and this place was the gathering spot of leading-edge artists and poets including Allen Ginsberg who gave readings there that were shocking to many persons.

However, Remington became weary of Abstract Expressionism, perceiving that paintings in that style had little distinction, one from the other.  Reaching for a completely different discipline, she went to the Orient where she lived in Japan with a Japanese family, learned the language, and studied calligraphy with Toyoda Senseil.  For her, this immersion resulted in focus on the reality of objects, and refinement and control in the execution.  However, her Eastern travels ended when she nearly drowned in India in the Ganges River, while she was working as a cook with a technological team.  Coming this close to death, she decided it was time to focus her life on her career.

She returned to San Francisco, supported herself as a waitress, and devoted herself to creating a painting style that was uniquely her own.  Her mature style combines thick paint and detailed images, strong contrasts of light and dark, and a limited palette. These paintings "can best be described as having a porthole effect---one seems to be looking through a central opening at mysterious light spaces that suggest sea, sky, and infinity, and yet seem to reverse themselves and become a flat mirror..." (Rubinstein 334).

In 1965, Remington moved to New York City, where she lives today (2003).  In addition to painting, she has also been an art instructor in California at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California at Davis, and at Cooper Union in New York.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum in California gave Remington a 1984 retrospective exhibition. Deborah Remington worked with color lithography during 1973 to 1980 in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Tamarind Institute.