Life & Wisdom Quote by Kit Williams

Artists love to romanticize possession: the studio as a private kingdom, the finished piece as an extension of the self. Kit Williams cuts against that sentimentality with a practical paradox: it is separation, not attachment, that sustains the artist. The line about parting "keeping us alive" has the bite of lived experience. If you never let a work leave you, you never make room for the next one. Selling isn’t just commerce; it’s an enforced ending, the kind that stops creative life from curdling into hoarding, perfectionism, or endless tinkering.

Williams is also quietly rewriting what ownership means. "Although it's been sold I actually still have it, just in another form" is less mystical than it sounds, and more strategic. He’s pointing to the artist’s real asset: not the object, but the idea, the pattern, the capacity to reconstitute the work through memory, sketches, documentation, or a later reimagining. The chariot becomes a case study in artistic afterlife, where the physical artifact can exit your hands while the conceptual imprint remains yours to carry forward.

Context matters here because Williams is an author-artist whose career sits at the intersection of storytelling, image-making, and collectible culture. In that world, objects circulate, accrue value, and become mythologized. His quote deflates the fetish of the original while defending the artist’s continuity: you can lose the thing and still keep the work, because the work was never only the thing.