Art and Antiques – "Contemporary British Artists"
Last year’s main Hunting prize winner was Nicholas Charles Williams who, having completed a two-year art foundation course at Richmond College in 1979, spent a period traveling before settling in Cornwall. His style of painting is traditional, if you like, echoing the Old Masters which for some will be deemed unfashionable; however, the quality of his figurative and still life compositions are worthy of great respect. Writing in the Evening Standard of 1st June 2001, the infamous art critic, Brian Sewell, who in 1992 included Williams’ work in ‘A Critic’s Choice’ at the Cooling Gallery, London, wrote: ‘How many of the (Turner Prize) judges have seen the old-fashioned pictorial fantasies of Nicholas Williams in his Newquay studio, a converted lifeboat station? – 200 square feet of his "Adoration of the Sea" is not cutting edge but has about it, as does all his work, the engaging madness of a driven man, an eccentricity of great appeal, the rashness of a painter who must paint and never mind the near impossibility of patronage.’ It could also be argued that at the time when conceptual art is all the ‘rage’, Williams’ remarkable paintings are indeed ‘cutting edge’!