Fish Out of Water

Big Red, a thirty-foot-long sculpture made out of bow trusses, sits in a stand of pines on a property outside of Columbia, South Carolina, part of a private collection. Mike Williams says he saw the f credit: Chris Rogers

We did not go fishing. What with the drought we’d all been suffering through the past few months, some of the best fishing holes he knew had simply dried up. Someone told him that the water levels were dropping so quickly that bass and bream were trapped in small pools of water separated from the river itself and that you could just reach in there and grab them. And there’s neither sport nor art in that.

The absolute worst review of my last book appeared in some rag from Columbia, South Carolina, so I drove down with a dark view of the entire town. But Columbia is actually all right; in fact, I’d say it’s a museum-quality midsized Southern city. It boasts a funky art scene, a statue to the Confederacy, euphemistically named bars such as the Wild Hare and Chubby’s and Big Slicks and Uncle Louie’s and Sneakers, some without windows to see into or out of, a ton of churches, beautiful women, more bars, a river, a football team that comes with its own university, an ancient abandoned redbrick building all beaten down and falling apart right around the corner from a state-of-the-art something-or-other, a couple more churches, dogs, a foreign car manufacturing plant, trailer parks and antebellum mansions, and it’s also the home of the artist Mike Williams. Mike paints fish.

Mike Williams. You’re thinking: That’s not an artist’s name. (It’s the name of a car salesman or your daughter’s first boyfriend.) I bring this up with Mike Williams. I say, Mike Williams is worse thanJohn Smith in the almost magical spell of forgetfulness it casts upon all those who hear it. I say I think he needs another name — not two, but one — because to be known by one name is to be truly known. Think Picasso. I say maybe I would make up a name for him in the article I’m going to write and see if that will make him as memorable as he should be, as known as he needs to be. How about something like ... Snapper. That’s just off the top of my head. Or Trout. Just one crazy name you can’t ever forget.

Unfortunately for him and his chances for that kind of fame, Mike Williams is a Mike Williams. By which I mean he’s an easygoing, hand-shaking kind of Southern man who seems to take chances in nothing but his art. You’d never guess what he does by looking at him. He’s a solid forty-four-year-old who looks like he knows which end of the hammer to use. His hair is short, parted on the left and combed nicely, as if he might be going to an office instead of a studio. Even his résumé is deceptive: From 1978 to 1987 it says he worked at an electric company, a manufacturing company, and a metal shop. The paint on his hands and his trousers you’d figure is there from painting, I don’t know, a house or something. But he’s not painting houses.

An artist needs a vehicle, an object that to him embodies the nature of our existence. His life is spent searching for that one perfect thing to express the totality of it all. It would appear that for Mike Williams that object is, yes, a fish. After all, he’s a guy who spent a good deal of his life, as he puts it, “walking around in the mud.”

From the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-five, not too far from where he lives today, he fished every day, he thinks — five hours a day. Mike Williams is a shy man, but he’s not shy about this. I would even say he’s proud of it, to let his heart guide him, day after day after day, down to the river. The woman who would become his wife says that she’d go to a party on Friday night looking for Mike and he wouldn’t be there. He’d be fishing. Who goes fishing at 9:30 on Friday night? she asked, as if she had to. They laugh about this now. And he always used lures — never anything alive. “Tricking the fish to bite with something that isn’t even real — there’s an art in that,” he says. Figuring out the weather and the wind and where the fish are going to go in it, which stumps they swim around when the day is like this — is an art. Later, when he began to paint the fish instead of catching them, he would do the same thing on canvas — trick us the same way. They say he once spent fourteen straight days alone in a canoe without food or water or beer, casting line after line, changing lure after lure, searching for that perfect moment when the fish would strike just as he imagined it would, the light and the wind and the surface of the water just right — a moment he created in his head long before it happened. But it never happened. Maybe this is why he became an artist, to create this moment. Maybe not.

But what can’t be disputed is that every day spent fishing or dreaming of catching fish contributed to the thousands of paintings and the sculptures he would later create. The next ten years would be spent in the studio, matching the length of time and degree of obsession he once spent on lakes and rivers. Studio? Well, not really. It’s more like a barn, or a storage shed, or a place where someone used to fix cars, now full to the rafters with his canvases. You can’t miss it: It’s the place with the huge metal fish sculptures surrounding it, as if a great lake had dried up and left behind the metal bones of the ancient denizens of the deep. This is where Mike Williams goes now instead of the river.

Mike Williams is painting the fish out of his life. Now you might catch him painting a landscape, or even a palmetto tree on occasion. But not too many of those. It seems lots of artists in South Carolina can paint a variation of a palmetto tree, but no one can do a fish like Mike Williams.

There’s an old billboard on Gervais Street, an advertisement for a church. This is another way you know where you are and where you aren’t: In the South churches take out advertisements on billboards, and this one has been there for a long time. Come Worship With Us, the sign says. But the o in worship is fading, and it appears to be an a, so the sign ends up looking as if it says Come Warship With Us. A reflection of the times in which we live.

Before Mike Williams painted fish, he painted signs and murals on the brick walls of a bait and tackle store. This was after just getting off the river. He needed to make some money, so he painted signs with arrows on them indicating where a person needed to go to get to a special event, or where to pick a watermelon. “My life was going nowhere,” he says. “I had no real ambition or personal direction and I was not earning a decent living ... I was ready to make some changes. So I painted signs while working on my B.F.A., and the job was fun — actually fun —almost immediately. I would be painting the wall of a bait and tackle shop and the public would offer unsolicited compliments that awakened a true sense of pride and sense of accomplishment that I found extremely encouraging.” It was pretty good money for a guy without a degree in anything except fishing, a guy who once caught a lavender largemouth bass weighing at least three or four or some say ten pounds out of the Congaree. He released it immediately. “There are no further rewards to be obtained from the removal of fish from the water,” he says, “beyond that necessary to remove a hook from its mouth.”

And to look at them, to see how he might paint them later.

Honestly, I’m glad we didn’t go fishing. We talked about it, as I said, and I think I gave him the impression that I was a bit of a fisherman, that I’d caught my share of fish over the years. But I’m a fisherman the way Mitt Romney is a hunter. Those rites of passage Mike Williams went through with his dad — the hunting and fishing, the getting up impossibly early in the morning to huddle in a frosty forest waiting for a buck to wander by and kill it — I never did that stuff. An artist makes things out of the absence of something as easily (or with as much difficulty) as he can out of its presence, so while I write predominantly about things I wish I knew, Mike Williams paints the world he knows — the ancient and mysterious fishy souls, the dreamy depths of the swampy swamp — and he attacks his canvases with paint as though he’s at war with all the white. He has no purpose until the purpose reveals itself in the gallimaufry of color he brings to it. We talk about how process reveals itself through action, and how trusting your instincts is more satisfying than painting with a preconceived notion of how a thing is supposed to look.
Mike Williams sometimes seems to paint fish the way they look to other fish. They actually appear to be darting across the canvas, probably escaping the hook. He calls this style Bent Americana.

On my last day in Columbia, Mike Williams drives me out to see one of the biggest fish he has ever made. In the car we listen to the new Vic Chesnutt CD. We drive away from all the bars and knickknack shops, past a sand factory, forking right off the main road and suddenly leave everything behind but more churches and trailer parks, which, like roaches, may be the only things extant in the South after they drop the Big One.

On the way there I wonder if instead of fishing for that watery decade, Mike Williams had been a coin collector, or hunted four-leaf clovers, or raised chickens, would he be painting pennies or clover or chickens? I don’t know. All I know is that Mike Williams sees fish in everything now. He sees fish in the cross-hatching shadows of telephone wires beneath a streetlamp on the road at night. He sees them in his dreaming mind. He even sees them in the steel trusses of a building they’re tearing down. Bringing order out of what was about to be the chaos of the debris of meaningless structure, he bought them and had them carted to his shop. What eventually transpired was a huge fish, and this is what we’re going to see, a fish made from the steel of something that used to be. And we drive down and down a long double-gated private road past a million adolescent pine trees and when he accelerates over a slight rise we see the city of Columbia in the distance, nestled in the folds of a hazel-green hilly forest, and drive on even a little while longer until we come to this — and even though we’ve come so far to see it, it’s still a surprise — this ... fish, as red and long as a fire truck in the middle of an otherwise empty pine forest. In a thousand years someone might dig this up and think that it’s a religious artifact of some kind. Mike Williams stands beside it with the pride of ownership that comes from creating something that never was before, something that will always be his, no matter whose property it’s on.

This is when I ask.

I say, Mike Williams, if you had to give up one thing forever, one thing, which would it be: fishing, or painting fish?

There’s only a slight pause and a minor smile, and then he says, “Oh, without a doubt, fishing.” But the way he says it, and the way he smiles, I’m not sure which he’s really talking about, or if there’s even a difference.