Carve Magazine - Nick Williams Artist

May 2002 - Steve England
(Selected passages from interview)

Nicholas Charles Williams, or Nick to his mates, is a long-time Fistral local whose artistic work has received critical acclaim. The old lifeboat Station which serves as his studio looks right over little Fistral and the legendary Cribber. Nick’s brushwork is so intricate it’s been branded as obsessive and the style he chooses has been pigeonholed as unfashionable, but he’s on a search and the essence of surfing runs through his work a little more deeply than he cares to admit.

Being a surfer, have you never been tempted just to paint waves?
No, surfing isn’t something that enters my work directly. I think the internal influences are probably harder to pin down. Surfing helps me in a different way. My work involves long periods of pretty intense concentration, and to go out and surf is a huge escape. I think that’s the same for a lot of people – it serves as a release.

Your studio is a stone’s throw from Fistral, how often do you go in?
Well, I used to go in all the time, I tried to fit the painting in around my surfing. Now I’m a little more selective and it’s the other way round, I tend to concentrate on the painting. Surfing is still a valuable thing in my life, although it can be very distracting, especially working here! So yeah, if it’s really good I’ll usually make the effort and go in.

Where do you stand on the ‘surfing is an art form’ debate?
Well, it’s certainly a way of people expressing themselves. If performance art and modern dance are art, then why not surfing? Free surfing, anyway. Competition surfing, maybe not so much. A lot of people say that competitions knock out the soul of surfing and I think there’s some truth in that. But at the end of the day a good surfer, any surfer, really is expressing themselves.

Do you think some people are trying to turn surfing into a sport so much, that they’re missing the point?
Definitely. I think it’s bad for the younger surfers. They’re being introduced to a sport with so much emphasis on the superficial things, like competitions and image. If they only see that side of surfing, they’ll never see the things that make it special.

If you had to give up either surfing or painting, which would it be?
Um…I can’t really see it like that because they both run parallel. They’re both really important to me. When you’re younger there aren’t many things that can compete with surfing, but as you mature you tend to start looking at things in a different way. Your priorities change and you realise that surfing can be part of your life while not dictating everything you do. I think that’s one slightly dangerous thing about surfing – it can take over your life. If you’re always racing to the next session, you miss out on a lot of things. Like, quite often people who’re travelling to some famous surf break go straight through a country without experiencing it. It’s a sacrifice that a lot of surfers make. They never get the chance to live in Rome or Paris or wherever. Even when they get to their destination, there are often lots of other things going on which they miss. I think as you get older you try to bring both aspects together and get more of a balance.