The Jackdaw - July/August, 2002 – David Lee
The extraordinarily ambitious painting, Adoration of the Sea by Nicholas Charles Williams (b. 1961), was unveiled in May in a new central library in Bournemouth...Williams, whose studio is in Cornwall, won the Hunting Art Prize in 2001 and produces as few as ten pictures a year.  Of this picture, which measures 21 feet by 10, the artist has written: "I completed Adoration of the Sea in 1999. It served as the central piece to my last group of works which focused on a procession in honour of the sea and the preparations that lead up to it.

"I made a conscious decision to try to make a piece that directly related to the sea and the relationships that people formed with it. Living in Cornwall, these integral links are very much apparent. For myself the link has been through surfing which I took up aged about 12 or 13. I decided to resist depicting an animated and bacchanalian type of procession concentrating rather on one that is all together slower, more measured and with some sense of order.

"In many ways the picture proved to be a massive learning curve. Because some of the models had other commitments with work, university etc., it became particularly difficult to build the picture as a whole with some areas becoming more developed than others as the painting progressed. My approach to painting also evolved while making this work."