Kit Williams

Kit Williams, 1982

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) jeweled 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 centerpiece 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 hour. Catching one of these bubbles entitles you to make a wish, hence the name of the clock.

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.

Masquerade, 1979

The Wishing Fish Clock, Regent Arcade, Cheltenham

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 obsessed 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.

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 ( ISBN 0-8052-3747-X )
• Kit Williams, Masquerade: The Complete Book with the Answer Explained , J. Cape, 1982 [paperback] ( ISBN 0-89480-369-7 )
• Kit Williams, The Book without a Name (The Bee on the Comb), Knopf, 1984 ( ISBN 0-394-53817-X )
• Kit Williams, Out of One Eye: The Art of Kit Williams, Crown, 1986 ( ISBN 0-517-56431-9 )
• Kit Williams, Engines of Ingenuity, Gingko Press, 2001 ( ISBN 1-58423-106-8 )

External links

• Masquerade FAQ
• Untitled book FAQ The Bee on the Comb
• 1984 Audio Interview with Kit Williams - RealAudio
• Wishing Fish Clock
• The Portal Gallery

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