User:Celia Toler/Stephen Williams, artist and teacher

Stephen Williams, artist and teacher ...

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Stephen Williams was born in Surrey, UK, in 1952. He studied at Frensham Heights, Farnborough Technical College, Ealing College of Further Education, Byam Shaw School of Art and Liverpool Polytechnic. He has taught at Byam Shaw of Art as a visiting lecturer for almost 25 years and is currently head of MA (Fine Art) at Central St. Martins, The University of the Arts, London. Intro: Stephen Williams (also known as S. L. Williams) began drawing at the age of 4. To begin with he made paint from earth and soap. Later he would experiment with tea, creosote and cement. Always investigative, he made a tree house called "Wols" (Owl's Place from Winnie the Pooh) in which, at the age of 12, he lived for 2 months as a form of protest. He was sent to the well-known child psychiatrist J. D. Winnicott and, from having been a very silent child, he learnt how to talk to people.

    Stephen's childhood was spent on a market garden smallholding. There were pigs, chickens and ducks. Vegetables and salad crops were grown for his father's wholesale fruit and vegetable business, while sugar beet was grown for the pigs to eat. He was an accident-prone child. Aged 5 he was nearly decapitated by a sash window and can still remember the feeling of being squashed and throttled. At 6 years old he impaled himself with a rusty spike from a chicken hutch and, on a memorable birthday, he cracked his head open on a radiator while playing with his elder sister, Toni. Aged 8, he was knocked unconscious by a local bread van in Arras while on holiday in France and had an 'out of body' experience, looking down from a cupboard above the table on which he was laid. He was runover by a tractor when he was 10 years old, breaking his ribs, his arm and cracking his right thigh. Finally in Paris, he fell through a plate glass window but emerged unscathed.
    With his parents he travelled in Europe, through France, Spain and Northern Italy. His mother had a car accident when he was 4 years old and he and his sister were sent to live with Tante Solange in Paris for several months, where he learned to speak French. When he was 15, he travelled independently to North Africa. He explored the coast and then travelled with a Berber tribe through the Sahara Desert for 5 months.
    Further details of first exhibitions abroad and other influential travels.