Philip Key meets the painter who is joining the likes of Tracey Emin and Elizabeth Frink with his latest exhibition
CHURCH art is not all stained glass windows and carved crucifixes these days. Contemporary artists are increasingly finding church buildings fine places to exhibit works.
Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral is a case in point which in recent years has welcomed a number of high profile artists, even commissioned some.
Sculptor Elizabeth Frink was one who in the early 1990s was asked to create a piece for the building. Her magnificent Risen Christ for the building proved to be her last work – she died in 1993, just one week after its installation.
Tracey Emin is another whose work has been seen there, and now British painter Nicholas Charles Williams has joined the ranks.
His huge triptych, titled Desider- atum, is on show all through January to mark the opening of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. Unusually, too, it is described as a secular work.
I tracked down Williams to his studio in Cornwall.
Cornwall has long been a magnet for artists with its own artists colonies.
Those on the south coast became known as the Newlyn School, and many more are now based on the north coast at St Ives, where the light is said to be particularly good.
But Williams has gone out of this town and created his own studio based on a former lifeboat station at Newquay, the quasi-Blackpool of the West Country, with tourist attractions all over the town.
“I am one of the few artists based here, if not the only one,” he re- ports. Williams, 46, however, loves to surf and Newquay has some of the best surfing beaches in the country.
“It also has,” he tells me, “the same wonderful light that you find elsewhere in the county.”
Born in Redhill, Surrey, Williams studied at Richmond College after which he spent some time travelling and occasionally surfing. He finally settled in Cornwall and has lived there for the last 25 years.
It was where he established his reputation as one of the country’s leading realist painters.
He has exhibited since 1990 in both solo and group shows, sometimes in the West Country but also in London, Wales, Norway and Russia.
He was also awarded the prestigious Hunting Art Prize.
It was in 1991 that Williams first came to public prominence when the waspish Brian Sewell, one of Britain’s leading art critics, selected his work for his Critic’s Choice exhibition.
“The quality of the painting seemed to be astounding,” he said.
Fellow critic William Packer has been equally impressed, describing Williams as “one of British art’s well-kept secrets”.
He is, he reported, “one of the most accomplished figurative artists of his generation and one of the most unusual.”
Visitors to Liverpool Cathedral will likely echo that view – Desid- eratum is certainly accomplished and most decidedly unusual.
