Neil Williams | Artist, Educator and Champion of Creative Learning.
Updated: 6 days ago
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Meet Neil Williams
In this interview, Mark created Neil Williams' fantasy cultural year from the answers to some easy questions to which there were no wrong answers.
Mark had a time machine and magic wand at his disposal, so expect some surprises, laughs, anecdotes and conversational detours.
Neil Williams has spent roughly four decades encouraging people to make things, think differently and occasionally look at an ordinary object and realise it might be considerably more interesting than they first thought.
He is an artist, educator, author, creative learning consultant and founder of the not-for-profit organisation 4D. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). His career has moved between the studio, classroom, community and wider creative sector, with one idea appearing consistently throughout: creativity works best when people are actually given the opportunity to use it.
Neil was born in Shropshire and has lived in Gibraltar and Shropshire again before studying in Bristol. His formal art education began through sculpture, although painting has increasingly become an important part of his practice. He describes his approach to painting as being influenced by his sculptural background.
Rather than thinking purely in terms of applying paint, he tends to think about modelling, form and revealing an image — almost as though the painting is something being uncovered rather than simply put onto a surface.
That distinction says quite a lot about how Neil approaches art.
He is interested in what sits underneath the obvious.
After moving to Suffolk in 1986, Neil began teaching Art and Design at Samuel Ward School, now Samuel Ward Academy. Forty years later, having spent an unusually long period working directly with generations of students. He is not, however, retiring from teaching.
The classroom has therefore never really been separate from his artistic practice.
For Neil, teaching is itself a creative discipline. Explaining something to another person forces you to reconsider what you think you know. Even describing something as simple as a pen becomes surprisingly difficult when the person listening cannot see it. Finding the right words, creating a connection and then somehow making that object inspiring enough for someone else to do something creative with it is a much bigger challenge.
It is also one of the reasons Neil believes teachers remain learners.
Neil's professional life has also taken him beyond the school environment. He has contributed to wider creative and educational discussions, worked on public creative projects, delivered lectures and presentations internationally and been involved with organisations and networks concerned with creativity, education and cultural development.
He has also contributed to projects in his local community, including creative designs associated with Haverhill's Clock Tower and Queen Street gates.
The combination of local and international work is important to Neil's practice. Creative education does not have to mean choosing between the classroom and the wider world.
In fact, Neil founded 4D, a not-for-profit arts organisation through which he develops creative learning projects and works with other organisations and practitioners. His professional interests include creative education, community practice, professional development and finding ways to provide meaningful creative opportunities in environments where resources can be limited.
The principle is fairly straightforward: a lack of expensive equipment should not automatically mean a lack of ambitious creative work.
This has informed Neil's interest in accessible creative processes, including approaches to printmaking that make use of equipment people may already have around them. Rather than treating technology as something separate from traditional art practice, he is interested in what happens when everyday technology becomes part of the creative toolkit.
For years, his working day was largely about helping other people develop their creative abilities. Now there is more opportunity to return to questions of his own.
Neil's own practice has moved between sculpture, painting, street art and other forms of visual experimentation. His early experience of street art and spray painting in Bristol also connects him with a period of British cultural history when young people were creating new forms of visual and musical culture with relatively little infrastructure behind them.
Neil's own painting practice is exploring a series of portraits based on women from literature. The starting point is what does a character in a book actually look like?
When somebody reads a novel, they construct an image of its characters in their own mind. That image is affected by everything else they have experienced — films they have seen, people they have met, places they have visited and even what kind of day they are having. Two people can therefore read exactly the same description and see completely different people.
Neil's portrait series explores that gap between written character, personal imagination and visual representation.
His approach is not simply to illustrate the characters as they have traditionally been depicted. Instead, he is interested in bringing them into the present and asking what they might look like now.
The paintings are informed by years of conversations with students. The questions in the studio have been shaped by questions in the classroom. The interest in imagination comes from observing how different people respond to the same ideas.
Over the years, students he has taught and mentored have gone on to develop careers across the creative industries, including professional art, television, creative marketing and teaching. Some have achieved major industry recognition, but Neil's interest is not simply in producing the next generation of famous artists.
The wider question is what creative education gives people even when they do not become professional artists.
Confidence. Problem-solving. The ability to interpret information. The willingness to experiment.
He is not particularly interested in presenting creativity as a mysterious talent possessed by a fortunate few. His career has instead been about making creativity something people can practise.
You do not necessarily need the perfect studio. You do not need the most expensive equipment. You do not need to know exactly what you are doing before you begin. Sometimes you just need to start.
For Neil, art education is not simply about producing technically competent artwork. It is about creating the conditions in which people can become more curious, independent and confident.
Examples of Neil Williams' work
Neil Williams' Fantasy Cultural Year ... with a magic wand and a time machine to hand.
Every Arts and Culture Network member is invited to embark on a Fantasy Cultural Year—an imaginary twelve-month journey designed around their passions, curiosity and imagination.
We find Neil Williams outside the Fitzwilliam Gallery in Cambridge, enjoying a Diet Pepsi with ice and Stig of the Dump — the book Neil credits with getting him interested in reading - beside him.
A wealthy family foundation offers to fund Neil for an entire year, travelling the world and experiencing the cultural adventures of his choice. There is, however, one condition. For the whole year, Neil can listen to only one type of music. His choice? English pastoral music, with Ralph Vaughan Williams very much at the front of the queue.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending become the soundtrack to a year that is about to become considerably more interesting.
First stop: Mexico
Given a magic wand and the opportunity to experience any dance performance he chooses, Neil doesn't go for traditional ballet or a spectacular contemporary production. He chooses early-1980s breakdancing.
It is a choice that takes him back to his own student days in Bristol, when he was involved in spray painting and street art and encountered the city's emerging creative scene, including the Wild Bunch — the group whose members would later become associated with Massive Attack.
There is, of course, time for dinner. Neil has been vegetarian for 30 years so the imaginary chef is given a fairly specific brief — produce a vegetarian carbonara that tastes like the real thing.
Gibraltar and the career that might have been
Next stop: Gibraltar. It is Sport Day, and Neil gets to choose the event. The answer is immediate: cricket.
Before art and teaching became his professional life, Neil had ambitions of becoming a county cricketer. He played at county youth level before university, so the fantasy year provides an opportunity to revisit the sport that might, in another version of his life, have become his career.
Back to London: music, dance and theatre
Then it's back to London, where Neil creates his ultimate cultural week.
Monday belongs to music. He chooses Simple Minds, a band he remembers as one of the best live acts he experienced during his art-college years.
Tuesday brings theatre. Neil admits that he hasn't seen as many plays as he would like, so the magic wand takes a slight detour. Instead, he chooses Ballet Rambert.
Then comes Wednesday, musical theatre. Neil chooses Jesus Christ Superstar — partly because of the music, but also because of the way the production has continued to be reinterpreted by different generations.
They finish off by heading to the IMAX for the ultimate cinematic experience of Apocalypse Now. Neil remembers first seeing the film in an arthouse cinema in Bristol. As the film progressed, somebody apparently turned up the heating in the building.
By the time the story reached the jungle, the audience was sweating. The cinema had unintentionally become part of the film. The heat, the sound, the helicopters and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries all became part of the experience so Neil wants to see it again — this time on the biggest screen possible.
The Fantasy Lunch Guest
There is one table waiting. Neil can invite anyone he chooses to lunch, living or dead, artist, writer, cultural figure or otherwise. His choice is Anne Frank.
It would be a difficult conversation, but an important one. Neil would want to talk with her about the world she experienced, the changes that have happened since and the things that, uncomfortably, have not changed enough.
Anne Frank also connects with another part of Neil's creative practice: his interest in portraiture and the way we represent people from the past. He has considered whether she could become a subject for his work, but there is a problem.
Could a new painting genuinely add something to the photographs of Anne Frank that already exist?
For Neil, that question matters.
A portrait isn't simply about making an image of someone. It is about deciding what you want the viewer to see, what you want them to think and whether your interpretation brings something new to the story.
Neil Williams' contact details.
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Mark Walmsley FRSA FCIM AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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