And The Mysteries of Kit Williams


About Kit Williams

Kit Williams spent time in the Royal Navy and worked with electronics during his younger years, but eventually found his calling of painting. When the man who would eventually publish Masquerade, Tom Maschler, first suggested the idea of a children's book to Kit, the author was reluctant. Once the idea of doing a complex treasure hunt was hatched, however, Williams could not deny it and forged ahead on what would become one of the most talked-about and ambitious literary projects of the time. It has spawned many imitators, and it's still the standard by which all similar books are judged. I was lucky enough to locate this 1984 radio interview, conducted by Don Swaim for use on CBS Radio, wherein Kit discusses his youth, his early career, the reaction to Masquerade and some teasing hints on his then-new untitled bee book. He was apparently in America on a press tour promoting the new book, and a reference is made to an American television appearance--anybody on this side of the Atlantic remember Kit on U.S. T.V.? This is the only time I've ever heard Kit speak! Click to hear it in streaming RealAudio or, if you prefer, as an MP3 courtesy of the audio talents of Richard Nash, who kindly and professionally converted it.

Today, Kit Williams continues to have his incredibly detailed works displayed at the Portal Gallery in London; if you visit the gallery's web site, you will see some of his latest works for sale. Much of his work is on commission now, however, and he arranges appointments with the public annually in a sort of "open house" event. Contact the Portal if you would like more information. (Serious inquiries only, of course.) He has also designed the Dragonfly Maze for Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds, and has made several gorgeous clocks for shopping centers (sorry, centres) in Cheltenham, England. One is is the Lady and Tiger Illusion Clock at the Beechwood Shopping Centre; another is the Bubble-Blowing Frog at the Telford Shopping Centre; a third is the Wishing Fish Clock for the Regent Arcade Shopping Centre. My wife spent a few months living in England, and when I showed her Wishing Fish Clock online, she said she'd seen the clock at Regent Arcade and never realized it was Kit's work. Her guide that day mentioned only that it had been created by "a children's book artist." Bah!

A collection of Kit's work, Out Of One Eye: The Art Of Kit Williams, was published in 1986 and is now out of print--as are the hardcover editions of his two treasure hunt books--but I've seen all three in libraries, and you can also get them from used-book supersites like Advanced Book Exchange or Bibliofind.

Engines of IngenuityKit's most recent book, Engines of Ingenuity, was published in 2001 (2002 in the US). I bought the book happily expecting "just artwork." However, the presentation of that artwork certainly is cryptic and, in some ways, oddly familiar. No mere picture book, the images (paintings, photographs, wood inlays, metalworking) are loosely tied together through what's essentially half a story--and of course, the missing half does leave the reader wondering. The narrative is about inventors and how they come upon their ideas (or vice versa), so the theme of intellectual curiosity is prevalent throughout. So while it may not have a physical prize for readers to unearth, it certainly does offer a pleasantly challenging mental workout. Kit's an artist, and artists exist to make us think. Engines of Ingenuity does that, so mission accomplished--if you're looking for a reward, consider that it! You can order a hardcover edition directly from Gingko Press, you can get it as a paperback from Amazon US or Amazon UK, or you can special-order it through your local bookstore. You'll also want to check out the interview with Kit that the publisher posted on its website. The editor's note at the end is interesting--it says Kit only exhibits his works once a year "in his own studio." Is this a private area of the Portal Gallery or does he no longer display there? Anyone with info on this is invited to drop me a line.

James McLaughlin located this profile of Kit which accompanied the solution in the Sunday Times Magazine. This article appeared June 20, 1982:

THE MAN OF MASQUERADE
by Susan Raven

"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 - without any O-levels - my mother was so fed up she sent me off to join the Navy."

He started painting on board the aircraft carrier Victorious ("she's razor blades now!"). "Everyone round me was playing cards - I couldn't do that. At first I thought I'd be a philosopher. So I read Nietsche and Marx and Russell for two days. No good. Then I decided to be the first visual philosopher."

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. He thought it was better than letting me fiddle around with the ship's computer, which had to look after 24 aircraft."

Kit Williams eventually bought himself out of the Navy, for £200 ("my life's savings, enough to have bought a car!"). Then he lived on his uppers for 10 years, touring the coast in a caravan, moving when the police moved him on, taking less and less demanding jobs so that he had the energy to paint and to think. Teaching himself a potted history of art 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.

He first showed his work in Bristol. Nobody, he says, came to the preview. He vowed he would never show his work again.

Then, the year he was in Whitstable, he 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. "That must have been 1971. In the end, somebody in England picked one up and wrote to me, thinking I was a child. When I wrote back saying, 'Actually, I'm on the dole,' this chap - a young man about to go to Cambridge University - came to see me. And it was he who brought me an entrance form for the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool."

So Kit Williams submitted to the organisers an intimate little picture of two people and a Morris Minor parked on a river bank. It was one of the 80 selected (from 800) and was bought by one of the Moores family before the exhibition even opened.

The Portal Gallery in London saw his 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...

Masquerade was published in September 1979 to a fanfare of publicity. The result was that Kit Williams's life was overwhelmed - by letters, telephone calls, even visits, from people who believed they were on the track of the solution. He opened all of the letters - at one time 200 a day - answered all the telephone calls until his number was made ex-directory, talked to all the visitors. None of them had got it right; and as time went by Kit Williams began to think he had made the puzzle too difficult, that no one would find his golden hare except by luck or accident.

Then, on February 18 this year, nearly two and a half years after publication, he recieved a solution from someone who signed himself "Ken Thomas".

"It was just a very childish sketch - there were no words at all on it. But it was exact."

However, when Williams telephoned Ken Thomas, it was clear that he had somehow deduced the right answer, although he hadn't cracked the code. But he had quite fairly and logically pinpointed the right spot, and the treasure was rightfully his. Its uncovering was witnessed by Kit Williams, Tom Maschler, Bamber Gascoigne, Magnus Linklater of The Sunday Times, and a TV crew.

Then, just a couple of days later, Kit Williams recieved a letter from two teachers in Lancashire. "They had worked out my method," says Williams, "completely and in every degree - in October the year before.

"They had written two letters to me, but had not sent them - they'd kept them in a drawer! They felt it was in the spirit of the thing to go and dig, and they had been too busy to do it."

Williams learned that one of the teachers and his wife had actually visited Ampthill back in January but, realising that they would need an inclinometer to measure the slope of the land, they went home and made one, in wood and cardboard, returning to the site on February 18. It was the very day on which Kit Williams recieved the letter from Ken Thomas. The Northern couple waited until it was dark, and dug a 4ft. square. But they failed to find the treasure. They decided not to try again until the equinox on March 22.

"It is a great shame they did not get in touch with me sooner," says Kit Williams. "But I was thrilled when I heard from them. I'd been so depressed that the treasure had been found without the code having been worked out. They are still the only people who have cracked it.

"I've always held - and the teachers agree - that the mystery was not esoteric, that a child of 10 could do it, with a lot of perseverance. Perhaps that need to stick with it is why the puzzle is more of a cult with the middle-aged."

Today Kit Williams lives in a tiny cottage in Gloucestershire with his second wife Eleyne. They met on a train in September 1980 and married three months later. She is a hand-(picture captioned "The only people who fully solved the puzzle - but didn't say so in time.") loom weaver - the daughter of hand-loom weavers in Stroud, nearby. There is also Bramble, the border collie, and a hive of bees: Williams's next book is about bees.

Masquerade sold more than a million copies, and the paintings were sold for four-figure sums. The Williamses could move anywhere. But, says Kit, he would never want to change his lifestyle. They now have a car, a studio for Eleyne and a workshop for Kit; but the cottage still has no central heating.

What has changed is that Williams now pays full rates for everything. "I spent 10 years almost on the breadline, making do with scraps and leftovers - and I could still do it. Money means that I can't use that skill, which means I've also had a pleasure removed."

His most immediate project is a wooden puzzle - a box so constructed that a ball of lead can be made to fall through a three-dimensional maze to release a little drawer containing something in gold. "I've never done it. But children can do it - a Japanese friend's seven-year-old twin sons cracked it in 20 minutes."

Williams has also been working on his next book for the last two years; it should be published in 1984. "Tom Maschler gave me a bottle of whisky and said, 'We must have another book out of you'. I said 'So long as it is a better idea and something no one has ever done before.' And a few weeks later I had just such an idea. It's very simple, but there's a twist." He will say no more. But it's clear that Williams's thousands of fans have another treat to look forward to.

Please check out this excellent interview from the Sunday Express Magazine in 1986, sent to me by...a very nice woman in England whose name I entirely forget. Please, come forward and take the credit. :) It's a large image so it's legible, so it may take a while to load--but it's worth reading!

It's also worth noting that, like my own, Kit Williams's eyes shoot off in two different directions and he can see independent images from each. Hey, a boy has to have his heroes.


This photo appeared on the back flap
of the Masquerade dust jacket.
Photo by Tara Heinemann.

Kit Williams, placing the jewel into its container, 1979

Kit places the Masquerade jewel
into its clay container, 1979.
Photo by Tara Heinemann.


Masquerade victor "Ken Thomas" and Kit, holding the jewel's clay casket after "Ken" had "solved" the mystery.
The photo was taken the day the jewel was unveiled to the press, and originally ran in Smithsonian magazine, May 1982. (Thanks to Chris Cole for the scan!)


To open the hare's clay burial casket, Kit melted the wax by heating it in a pan.
The clay was intended to thwart metal detectors--and it worked.
The photo is uncredited, but it originally ran in Smithsonian magazine, May 1982.


Kit the beekeeper!
Holding the prize for "the bee book,"
on the back of Untitled, circa 1983.
Photo by Sophie Baker.

Kit on the dust jacket for Out of One Eye, 1988.
Photo by Denis Waugh;
woodworking, of course, by Kit.


Harold Benney's photo of the
Wishing Fish Clock at the Regent Arcade.
Click on the photo for a much larger version.

The Lady and the Tiger Illusion,
borrowed from the Beechwood
Shopping Centre's website.


Mark Britten sent in photos of both parts of the
Telford Bubble-Blowing Frog clock.
Many thanks Mark!
Click on the photo for a much larger version.

Mark says, "The red wheel travels between the two parts
taking manufactured gold balls from one end
and feeding them into the clock at the other end."
Click on the photo for a much larger version.


Beyond Kit

When does the art no longer belong to the artist? When people start putting it on their skin. Toby Malcolm wins the Most Dedicated Fan award with this stunning tattoo of the jewel. "I had it done in early 2005 by an amazing tattoo artist here in Edinburgh named Sarah," he says. "She traced it directly from the Sotheby's image so I can guarantee it's size is accurate to the millimeter. She managed to do an amazing job getting the colors accurate too. And yes, before you ask, it was very painful. It took two sittings of two hours each, but it was worth it I think."

But why stop there? Toby went back and had some more Kit-inspired ink added later in the year. "This time I took my inspiration from Kit's painting "Advancing Ripe Harvest" featured in the Out of One Eye book. And yes, it was monumentally painful." Well, Toby, they are thorns...

Toby's impeccable recreation of the jewel, on very precious canvas.
Click for a larger version.

Toby's enhanced tattoo with extra art from Out of One Eye.
Click for a larger version.


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