Kit Williams

Kit Williams (born April 28 , 1946 in Kent, England) is an English artist, illustrator and author best known for his book Masquerade , a pictorial storybook which contains clues to the location of a golden (18 carat) jewelled hare created by Williams and then buried "somewhere in Britain."

Williams wrote another puzzle book with a bee theme; the puzzle was to figure out the title of the book and represent it without using the written word. This competition ran for just a year and a day and the winner was revealed on the live BBC TV chatshow Wogan .

In 1985, Kit Williams designed the Wishing Fish Clock, a centrepiece of the Regent Arcade shopping centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England. Over 45 feet tall, the clock features a duck that lays a never-ending stream of golden eggs and includes a family of mice that are continually trying to evade a snake sitting on top of the clock. Hanging from base of the clock is a large wooden fish that blows bubbles every half hour. Catching one of these bubbles entitles you to make a wish, hence the name of the clock.

Other clocks designed by Williams can be found in Telford Shopping Centre and in the Midsummer Place section of Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre.

Williams was also involved in the design of the Dragonfly Maze in Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, England, which comprises a yew maze with a pavilion at the centre. The object is not only to reach the pavilion, but to gather clues as one navigates the maze. Correctly interpreting these clues when one reaches the pavilion allows access to the maze's final secret.

In August 2009, Kit Williams was reunited with the golden hare which he had not seen for more than 20 years . He is quoted as saying:

Art background

Excerpts from The Man of Masquerade by Susan Raven, June 20 , 1982 , The Times :

"I became a painter because I was a painter," says Kit Williams. He was almost put off art at school; "but I always knew I could do it. And thinking visually was useful in physics, and I spent my time building television sets and sending up rockets. When I left school... my mother was so fed up she sent me off to join the Navy."

Kit started painting on board the aircraft carrier Victorious. To keep steady when the ship was moving, he used to tie down the canvas, and the seat he was sitting on; he even tied his arm to an armrest. "They thought I was very strange, but my divisional officer somehow understood. He gave me a tiny compartment to paint in."

Leaving the Navy, Kit toured the British coast in a caravan for nearly a decade, with his wife Helen, also a talented artist in her own right, taking less and less demanding jobs so that he had the energy to paint and to think. He discovered English painters like Blake and Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer: "I felt related to them, I identified with them." Today, he says "Botticelli is my man." One can see traces of all of them in his obsessive and haunting canvases.

In Whitstable, Kit used to collect driftwood on the shore and make little boats with his address inside, and push them out to sea, hoping to get replies from half way across the world. "In the end, somebody in England picked one up and wrote to me — a young man about to go to Cambridge University. It was he who brought me an entrance form for the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool."

Kit submitted an intimate little picture of two people and a Morris Minor parked on a river bank. It became one of the 80 selected for the exhibition and was immediately bought by one of the Moores family.

His brother Dominic Williams is a renowned translator of oriental text, resident in Brighton, UK.

The Portal Gallery in London saw this Liverpool picture and asked him if they could show his work. And it was after their second Kit Williams exhibition, in 1976, that publisher Tom Maschler asked him to do a children's book... and that was when Masquerade was conceived.

Select bibliography

Kit Williams, Masquerade , J. Cape, 1979
Kit Williams, Masquerade: The Complete Book with the Answer Explained , J. Cape, 1982
Kit Williams, The Book without a Name , Knopf, 1984
Kit Williams, Out of One Eye: The Art of Kit Williams , Crown, 1986
Kit Williams, Engines of Ingenuity , Gingko Press, 2001

References

^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8212244.stm
^ http://www.bunnyears.net/kitwilliams/aboutkit.html

Kit Williams Design // Business Cards « Kit Williams Design

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Kit Williams

Kit Williams

Art background

Select bibliography

References

Kit Williams Design // Business Cards « Kit Williams Design

Kit Williams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kit Williams Interview with Don Swaim

Masquerade (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kit Williams - New York, NY | Facebook

Masquerade & The Mysteries of Kit Williams

Kit Williams – Engines of Ingenuity

Kit Williams - Nashville, TN | Facebook

Kit Williams on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music ...

Kit Williams' Web Sight

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