Laid out on a table, surrounded by ordinary household objects, is a naked young woman, one hand dangling tentatively above her smooth white stomach. A young man gazes down her body and she is watched from the sides by a crowd of curious and accusing eyes.
A young, half-naked woman is running through woods, one arm outstretched as if to strike, face contorted into a scream of rage, while in the background a besuited man dances with two creatures that are simultaneously trees and naked women.
Penny Wedding and The Rage of Syrinx are just two paintings from a collection of fantastical images that have emerged over the last 40 years from the mind of Kit Williams, surely one of the most imaginative artists at work in Britain today. ‘It’s as if years and years ago I was locked away in a windowless room, and I’ve had to paint my way out of it. The windows are paintings through which you can go into another world. It turns out that it’s the inside of my mind, that the other world inhabits.’
This other world is rich with imagery from nature and people, myths and legends, all painted with a meticulous attention to detail and the brightness of fairytale illustrations. Williams tells me, ‘I do not understand how abstract work works. My work is about people and how people think.’ He compares art to a swimming pool, where the modern artist is paddling in the shallow end, while he swims in the depths of storytelling.
The detail in Williams’s work is all the more extraordinary where it has expanded beyond the confines of the flat, rectangular canvas. When he couldn’t afford to frame his early work, the ever-inventive Williams turned to marquetry, gluing thin wood veneers onto a wooden background. The first frame made this way was assembled from a ‘make-your-own-galleon’ kit from a craft shop.
‘It released me from the rectangle!’ Williams enthuses, ‘I was free then, I could go anywhere!’ And he went to mirrors, hinges, and secret doors, to the wing of a bird continuing into the wood of the frame, and even into 3D. When he was too poor to stop painting during two months backpacking around India in the 70s, Williams created a sphere inside a globe, that he kept fastened shut with an elastic band in his backpack while the oil paint dried.
There is a vast and fascinating body of work that could be discussed; however, when agreeing to be interviewed, Williams suggested that I choose just a few paintings that ‘caught my eye’. In 1979 Williams’ book Masquerade, a pictorial riddle which held the key to finding a golden hare buried somewhere in the British countryside, captivated the nation, and treasure hunters up and down the country searched for the prize for two years. However, Williams, tired of the media storm that enveloped him during the furore and afterwards, retreated deep into the Gloucestershire countryside where he could not be disturbed, now only exhibiting privately at his house. Our discussion was not to focus on the ‘same-old’ questions, but on the works that captured my attention.
When I saw Penny Wedding, the vulnerable, skinny young woman laid out like a meal, I couldn’t help but think that she was about to be raped. Williams wasn’t put off by my interpretation, but pleased. ‘With all my paintings, you have to be drawn towards it, and repelled from it in equal measure. And that’s what becomes exciting. Just being drawn towards something is “chocolate boxey”. Just being repelled by something is Tracey Emin, is Damien Hirst.’
Of course, the painting was far more complex than that. Williams said that his work was usually the ‘marriage’ of disparate ideas. A phrase or concept will ‘intrigue’ him, but ‘most often doesn’t have enough substance in it to make it work; so I store it in my memory. It might stay there for a day, a week, a year, ten years.’ Eventually another completely different idea arrives, and the painting is born.’
Penny Wedding, Williams told me, was a good example of the ‘two ideas’ – the first to arrive was ‘stored away’ for eight years. This was the penny wedding, a Scottish highland tradition in poor communities, where guests would place a penny in a wooden bowl. Everyone could afford it, and so the wedding was paid for.
The Irish and Welsh Celtic tradition of ‘sin eating’ brought the painting to life. Williams explained, ‘When someone dies they are laid out, before the wake. The sin eater, who is a person in the village, is invited to the house. He or she is given a meal, roast taters and everything, set upon the coffin … So when he leaves, he takes the sins of the departed with him – he’s eaten the sins. The soul of the departed can go to heaven.’
Yet these two strange tales gave rise to a painting depicting neither. The picture is of a bride who is an outsider, marrying into a poor fishing community where, as in Williams’ childhood, a room above a shop is hired for the wedding, and the presents laid out on the table. However, Williams explained, ‘She is not stark naked lying among the wedding presents. It’s how she feels – to be inspected by the whole family, to be quantified, to be judged.’
Meanwhile, the groom at the other end of the table can do nothing but look on helplessly, while his family, the leering grandfather, the jealous brother, the vain cousin, in the moving wooden doors of the painting, gossip and sneer, perhaps commenting on how thin the bride is. ‘The model was wonderfully skinny, with nipples like fried eggs on the table’, Williams told me.
The second painting that caught my eye, The Rage of Syrinx, has a wonderful immediacy: you can’t fail to be drawn to the young woman flying through the painting in a hurricane of rage. Here Williams was inspired by an Ovidian myth. But like all Williams’ paintings the story he tells is very much his own. In the original tale, the mischievous man-goat Pan pursues a young wood nymph, Syrinx, chasing her into a river bed, only to emerge with an armful of reeds, with which he invents the panpipes. However, in Williams’ mind, the tale has moved on. Syrinx is getting married and Pan has crashed her wedding, causing her fit of anger.
Williams tells me that Pan was always depicted by the Greeks with an erect penis, to show  that he was a ‘shameless hussy’. And sure enough, within the wooden frame, shaped like a screaming mouth, is the satyr. ‘I think this is the only erect penis in marquetry in the world. It’s yet to be disputed!’, Williams tells me with a grin.
And, again, as with all Williams paintings, there are multiple meanings. He tells me that it is about pre-nuptial anxiety – losing the ring, the bridesmaids eloping, the hair that looks like a bed of reeds – but also about women feeling that they are ‘entrapped in a silken cage’, like Syrinx’ caged petticoat (a real one was created specially by Williams for his model to wear). I ask him whether he is qualified to say this, as a man. His eyes once again twinkle wryly, ‘It’s passive observation’, he laughs.
And I realise, having discussed only a few paintings, that we have whiled away over an hour. While Williams’ rich, narrative work may not to be to everyone’s taste, to hear him talk of it is to catch a glimpse into an inventive, imaginative and utterly unique mind.Â
Laid out on a table, surrounded by ordinary household objects, is a naked young woman, one hand dangling tentatively above her smooth white stomach. A young man gazes down her body and she is watched from the sides by a crowd of curious and accusing eyes.A young, half-naked woman is running through woods, one arm outstretched as if to strike, face contorted into a scream of rage, while in the background a besuited man dances with two creatures that are simultaneously trees and naked women.
Penny Wedding and The Rage of Syrinx are just two paintings from a collection of fantastical images that have emerged over the last 40 years from the mind of Kit Williams, surely one of the most imaginative artists at work in Britain today. ‘It’s as if years and years ago I was locked away in a windowless room, and I’ve had to paint my way out of it. The windows are paintings through which you can go into another world. It turns out that it’s the inside of my mind, that the other world inhabits.’
This other world is rich with imagery from nature and people, myths and legends, all painted with a meticulous attention to detail and the brightness of fairytale illustrations. Williams tells me, ‘I do not understand how abstract work works. My work is about people and how people think.’ He compares art to a swimming pool, where the modern artist is paddling in the shallow end, while he swims in the depths of storytelling.
The detail in Williams’s work is all the more extraordinary where it has expanded beyond the confines of the flat, rectangular canvas. When he couldn’t afford to frame his early work, the ever-inventive Williams turned to marquetry, gluing thin wood veneers onto a wooden background. The first frame made this way was assembled from a ‘make-your-own-galleon’ kit from a craft shop.‘It released me from the rectangle!’ Williams enthuses, ‘I was free then, I could go anywhere!’ And he went to mirrors, hinges, and secret doors, to the wing of a bird continuing into the wood of the frame, and even into 3D. When he was too poor to stop painting during two months backpacking around India in the 70s, Williams created a sphere inside a globe, that he kept fastened shut with an elastic band in his backpack while the oil paint dried.
There is a vast and fascinating body of work that could be discussed; however, when agreeing to be interviewed, Williams suggested that I choose just a few paintings that ‘caught my eye’. In 1979 Williams’ book Masquerade, a pictorial riddle which held the key to finding a golden hare buried somewhere in the British countryside, captivated the nation, and treasure hunters up and down the country searched for the prize for two years. However, Williams, tired of the media storm that enveloped him during the furore and afterwards, retreated deep into the Gloucestershire countryside where he could not be disturbed, now only exhibiting privately at his house. Our discussion was not to focus on the ‘same-old’ questions, but on the works that captured my attention.
When I saw Penny Wedding, the vulnerable, skinny young woman laid out like a meal, I couldn’t help but think that she was about to be raped. Williams wasn’t put off by my interpretation, but pleased. ‘With all my paintings, you have to be drawn towards it, and repelled from it in equal measure. And that’s what becomes exciting. Just being drawn towards something is “chocolate boxey”. Just being repelled by something is Tracey Emin, is Damien Hirst.’
Of course, the painting was far more complex than that. Williams said that his work was usually the ‘marriage’ of disparate ideas. A phrase or concept will ‘intrigue’ him, but ‘most often doesn’t have enough substance in it to make it work; so I store it in my memory. It might stay there for a day, a week, a year, ten years.’ Eventually another completely different idea arrives, and the painting is born. Penny Wedding, Williams told me, was a good example of the ‘two ideas’ – the first to arrive was ‘stored away’ for eight years. This was the penny wedding, a Scottish highland tradition in poor communities, where guests would place a penny in a wooden bowl. Everyone could afford it, and so the wedding was paid for.The Irish and Welsh Celtic tradition of ‘sin eating’ brought the painting to life. Williams explained, ‘When someone dies they are laid out, before the wake. The sin eater, who is a person in the village, is invited to the house. He or she is given a meal, roast taters and everything, set upon the coffin … So when he leaves, he takes the sins of the departed with him – he’s eaten the sins. The soul of the departed can go to heaven.
Yet these two strange tales gave rise to a painting depicting neither. The picture is of a bride who is an outsider, marrying into a poor fishing community where, as in Williams’ childhood, a room above a shop is hired for the wedding, and the presents laid out on the table. However, Williams explained, ‘She is not stark naked lying among the wedding presents. It’s how she feels – to be inspected by the whole family, to be quantified, to be judged. Meanwhile, the groom at the other end of the table can do nothing but look on helplessly, while his family, the leering grandfather, the jealous brother, the vain cousin, in the moving wooden doors of the painting, gossip and sneer, perhaps commenting on how thin the bride is. ‘The model was wonderfully skinny, with nipples like fried eggs on the table’,Williams told me.
The second painting that caught my eye, The Rage of Syrinx, has a wonderful immediacy: you can’t fail to be drawn to the young woman flying through the painting in a hurricane of rage. Here Williams was inspired by an Ovidian myth. But like all Williams’ paintings the story he tells is very much his own. In the original tale, the mischievous man-goat Pan pursues a young wood nymph, Syrinx, chasing her into a river bed, only to emerge with an armful of reeds, with which he invents the panpipes. However, in Williams’ mind, the tale has moved on. Syrinx is getting married and Pan has crashed her wedding, causing her fit of anger.
Williams tells me that Pan was always depicted by the Greeks with an erect penis, to show  that he was a ‘shameless hussy’. And sure enough, within the wooden frame, shaped like a screaming mouth, is the satyr. ‘I think this is the only erect penis in marquetry in the world. It’s yet to be disputed!’, Williams tells me with a grin.And, again, as with all Williams paintings, there are multiple meanings. He tells me that it is about pre-nuptial anxiety – losing the ring, the bridesmaids eloping, the hair that looks like a bed of reeds – but also about women feeling that they are ‘entrapped in a silken cage’, like Syrinx’ caged petticoat (a real one was created specially by Williams for his model to wear). I ask him whether he is qualified to say this, as a man. His eyes once again twinkle wryly, ‘It’s passive observation’, he laughs.
And I realise, having discussed only a few paintings, that we have whiled away over an hour. While Williams’ rich, narrative work may not to be to everyone’s taste, to hear him talk of it is to catch a glimpse into an inventive, imaginative and utterly unique mind.Â
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