Economy of Line

It’s not yet 7 a.m., and Ty Williams has already shifted into high gear. I’m riding shotgun with the 39-year-old artist as we drive a rain-slick road, winding through a landscape of farmhouses and estates, pitch-roofed colonials and tract homes, on our way to the coast from his parents’ house in South Berwick, Maine.

Williams has already burned through three political podcasts, passively listening to the first few minutes of each before deeming it boring. Eventually he lands on a playlist of downtempo dub and sets his phone in the center console. All the while, he’s been talking a mile a minute, editorializing on a head-spinning range of topics from, say, presidential politics to the enduring influence of the indie-music blog Gorilla Vs. Bear to just how damn attractive the soft-top-riding French Canadians—long considered undesirable interlopers to this area’s surf scene—tend to be. 

“They’re so good-looking,” he says. “You can’t be mad at them.” 

As he drives, he occasionally stretches his head over the steering wheel, cricking his neck in a hopeless attempt to survey the precarity of the roof’s surfboard situation—a comical stack of a half-dozen crafts ranging in size, shape, fin setup, and construction from a 5’6″ Wegener Bluegill to a 12’0″ Surftech Mickey Muñoz glider.

As an artist, Williams is known for many things: a tropical color palette. Whimsical, Matisse-inspired patterns. Primitive doodles featuring gangly characters engaged in euphonic movements. Text-based illustrations of aspirational phrases with a wry bent. He works confidently and compulsively, deploying an economy of line that’s unique to his own hand, which is seemingly always jonesing for a fix—whether a quick-hit sketch on scratch paper or the extended release of a large-scale mural project. 

“Every time I see Ty’s work—doesn’t matter if it’s a graphic or a mural—it’s really apparent that his hand was behind it,” says San Francisco–based artist Jeff Canham. “The way I work is pretty fussy and laborious. So, watching him work loose and fast, it’s something I admire and aspire to.”

Williams’ designs have been used to augment the seasonal capsules of a long list of surf and outdoor brands. He’s illustrated merch, show posters, and other ad-mat-y stuff for surf-adjacent and indie bands like the LA garage group Allah-Las, the artist Kyle Field’s Little Wings project, and the Venezuelan art-rocker Devendra Banhart. His murals decorate walls in New York, Florida, California, Greece, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Sri Lanka, and many places in between. Prints of his paintings, illustrations, and mixed-media and assemblage pieces, as well as the originals themselves, are increasingly sought after. 

In person, Williams is a riot. Easy to laugh and a quick study, he’s prone to frenetic, extended monologues that unfurl like a B-52’s song, incorporating a deft and surprising mix of high- and lowbrow references. He’s also a gregarious ambassador to whatever place he calls home. For the majority of his life—between a chunk of his adolescence in the Caribbean, two stints in Florida, and one each in New York and Los Angeles, respectively—home has been coastal Maine.

“When I was a teenager going off to college, I was really like, ‘I’m out of here and I’m never coming back,’” he tells me. And for the last two decades, as he’s developed his visual language as an artist and built a hefty Rolodex of freelance clients, Williams has indeed been on the move. 

Now, however, he’s returned home, currently living with his parents while he renovates a house near the coast in southeast Maine. While physically it’s a transitional period, mentally he’s feeling settled. “I think I’m going to run away a little bit less,” he says. 

I’ve visited this area a dozen or so times in the decade since I met Williams. For this rotation, I booked a quick trip, hoping he’d entertain me with one of his famous tours while 

I collected information for this profile. We originally made plans to see the house he’s renovating and the corner-pocket cove bearing the speckled rocks that inspired one of his popular motifs—a kind of abstract marbling he creates using a Japanese dry-brush technique. 

The rest of the itinerary included some hours at his family’s horse farm, maybe enjoying one of his mom’s vegetarian dinners. But the materialization of an early season tropical storm, now heading north from its position a few hundred miles off the mid-Atlantic coast, is sending fetch toward us, throwing a welcome wrench in the works. 

Accordingly, over the next three days we spend a lot of time in the car, driving from spot to spot, ducking behind headlands in search of waves, occasionally zagging back to the farm to refuel, with Williams launching into a number of amusing monologues as I try to get him to commit to record at least some of his biography. We also spend an equal amount of time, if not more, in the water, one of two places where he seems to actually slow down and find solace. 

“I’m really wound up most of the time and feel like I need to be moving,” he says. “The ocean is the main remedy for me, getting my mind off of my feelings. But when that’s not possible, when it’s the middle of the night and I’m awake, it’s always nice to have scratch paper and a pencil.”

•

One morning, I find Williams at his parents’ harvest table in the dining room, adjacent to the kitchen, scribbling into a notepad before we head out to look for waves. The table has been in his family for most of his life, and it’s where he did his first drawings. He sits, doodling away, as I pull a French press and a bag of coffee grounds from the pantry. 

Evidence of his practice is strewn about—colored pencils, sketchbooks and tracing paper in various sizes, twine and speckled rocks, stacks of drawings of flowy-dress-clad fishmongers, the newest additions to his community of quirky characters. Relatively tech-averse for a millennial, Williams prefers handmade illustrations. The use of a scanner and electronic mail is pretty much the extent of his computer literacy. 

His parents, Wendy and Al, are also early risers. As I wait for my immersion brewing to commence, Al shows me the leather vice he recently found at a yard sale and tells me about his plans to refurbish it and hopefully turn a quick buck. Wendy, meanwhile, is rehabbing a horse bridle.

Williams was born into a thrifty household. Al’s a jack-of-all-trades kinda carpenter and a renovator of historic homes in the area. Wendy is an art lover and former English teacher. Together, as antiques dealers, they’ve made a formidable team. 

When he was a kid, Williams’ parents would load him and his sister into a U-Haul truck packed with vintage and rehabbed finds, then drive to antiques fairs, where they’d post up for the weekend. “My parents would stage these amazing booths, and I’d just go hunting for stuff,” he says, remembering those experiences fondly while admitting that he didn’t appreciate it at the time. “I was over it. And that bums me out.”

All artists, in a way, develop their craft through a process of collection, accumulating colors, textures, and techniques to create a visual language of their own. Like his parents, Williams possesses both a thrill for the find and a preternaturally keen eye for the overlooked or discarded. Though he has little in the way of formal training in fine-art conventions, Williams has amassed a distinctive tool kit, a kind of Antiques Roadshow of influences, both ephemeral and regional, connecting the tropical to the continental. 

“His curatorial ability as an artist really stands out to me,” says Ventura-based artist and designer Matt Titone, who’s known Williams and worked with him on a number of projects over the years, including for his Surf Shacks coffee-table-book series, which captured the stacks of art books and surfy ephemera that filled Williams’ former home in Florida. “He’s really good at leaning into his own biography, his obscure influences and reference points, to make his work his own.” 

•

One afternoon, following a surf, we swing through the Grain Surfboards compound to pick up a new prototype that Grain founder Mike LaVecchia hopes Williams will give a whirl. Williams met LaVecchia nearly 20 years ago, when Mike and his brother, the photographer Nick LaVecchia, first moved to Maine. They’ve been close ever since. 

“Though his mediums and materials are always changing, he’s stayed true to his whimsical style and his willingness to create art anywhere,” Nick says when I ask about watching Williams develop his practice over the years. “He’s got thoughts in his head from the moment he wakes up. And making things is the way that all gets blurted out.”

Mike asks us how the waves were, and then the conversation turns to Williams’ renovation. “If you’ve got a mattress, let’s throw it in my truck and I’ll help you bring it in the house,” Mike tells him, keen to get him moved in. 

Though it’s not quite move-in ready, the renovation is a capstone project of sorts, foreshadowing what Williams hopes will be a period of stasis after two decades adrift. It follows what was a highly productive post-pandemic stint spent mostly in Burlington, Vermont, where he made use of the studio space of his partner, the artist Jasmine Parsia. Among other new projects, he began a series of still lifes—wash paintings done in a Mediterranean-inspired palette of cerulean and turquoise, faint orange and cyan. “I don’t completely stop doing something, or say, ‘This is the last one of these I’m doing,’” he says. “I tend to bounce between things depending on the space that I’m in, physically as much as mentally.”

Landlocked and occasionally stir-crazy in Vermont, he was making ever more frequent drives to Maine to surf. He stumbled upon the house during one of those strike missions. Obscured by overgrowth, its foundational integrity and salvageability questionable, it was one of the few properties that hadn’t drawn the interest of the urban exiles, private-equity groups, or Airbnb entrepreneurs who’d set the area’s housing market on fire in the years after the pandemic. 

“I’ve always liked being here in the summer, when it’s, you know, ‘Vacationland’ vibes,” he says, citing the nickname that has adorned the state’s license plates for nearly a century. “The older I get, though, the more I want to be here when it’s negative 11 degrees. There’s something about feeling every part of a place.”

Williams was born in Maine, but his parents followed a group of friends down to St. John, seeking adventure and investment opportunities, when he was in his early adolescence. Each day, Williams rode a ferryboat to a Montessori school on St. Thomas. He remembers the family’s treehouse-style bungalow and the vibrant Ken Done prints that his mother hung on its walls.

“There were some really seminal things that happened there,” he says of his time in the Virgin Islands, citing the inspiration for the pinks and turquoises that defined some of his earliest works—and his lifelong love affair with reggae. 

A not-unfounded fear of hurricanes eventually pushed the family back to Maine when Williams was entering middle school. He got heavy into skateboarding and gravitated toward the graphics of brands like Toy Machine, Creature, and Anti-Hero, which he found inside skateboard retail catalogs like CCS. After an antiques dealer bequeathed him a beat-up Ian Byrne thruster, his mom got him a wetsuit and he started surfing. He was captivated by the stylish and spindly representational figures drawn by Andy Davis, which he found in Surfer. 

“I tend to bounce between things depending on the space that I’m in, physically as much as mentally.”

Even before this period, he was constantly drawing. “When I had friends over, my mom would just drop a box of colored pencils or something on the table,” he remembers. “We didn’t have video games or cable or computers, really, in our house, so when I went to friends’ houses, I’d really binge.” 

Though he earned a “most artistic” superlative from his high school peers, he didn’t consider pursuing an arts education. When deliberating college visits, he picked out University of North Carolina Wilmington, near Wrightsville Beach, as well as Flagler College and Brevard Community College, in St. Augustine and Cocoa, Florida, respectively. As a surf-obsessed teen growing up on the far edge of the North American surf scene, it’s not hard to see why Florida held such appeal.

“My mom drove me down for my interview at Flagler the same weekend as the King of the Peak contest at Sebastian Inlet,” he says, recounting the event in vivid detail and a chance encounter with Todd Morcom. “I’d seen him in September Sessions, and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’” he says. “Being a surfer from Maine, someone who looked at ESM [Eastern Surf Magazine] religiously, we didn’t get much up here. Florida just seemed like the center of it all, at least to me.”

While in school at Flagler, Williams got his first paid art gig, $200 for a T-shirt graphic for Hurley. “It was like I’d won Powerball or something,” he says. Though he was studying communications and marketing, his eyes were just beginning to open to the possibility that he could make a go at art when Thomas Campbell brought the tour for his 2004 film, Sprout, through St. Augustine. 

It may be hard to remember, but in the pre-algorithm early aughts, indie-music blogs and MySpace were providing savvy kids a window into the garage bands, hip-hop mixtapes, and electroclash culture percolating in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Campbell, with his skate and surf films, and his connections to the influential Alleged Gallery on the Lower East Side, opened up a Pandora’s box for Williams and many others. 

“Like, single-fins and thoughtful art and music and filmmaking: This is a conversation that I want to be a part of,” he says of Campbell’s work, which for Williams eventually offered a portal to Sister Corita Kent, Charles and Ray Eames, New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg, and Alexander Girard, among other influences. “[Sprout] blew the lid off for me.” 

Like many indie-inclined millennials who graduated college in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Williams chased his muse to Brooklyn. “Williamsburg was Zion,” he says, laughing. 

He then moved to Los Angeles for a spell, and did stints back in Maine. He paid rent working in the service industry—waiting tables, mostly—and subsidized his income with freelance work, largely one-off designs for brands, while experimenting with his art practice. 

By the time he decided to move back to St. Augustine, in 2014, he had a steady workload of freelance commissions and was traveling often to paint murals. “There was a deep and exciting creative culture there in St. Augustine at the time,” he says, citing the group of art-school students, musicians, and makers he fell in with, a collective that included photographers like Kelly Conway and the late Russell Brownley. “I don’t know if that’s just something you’re prone to believe when you’re older, but I truly felt that.”

“St. Augustine, because of Flagler and its art program, its proximity to the ocean, tends to bring in an interesting mix of fresh faces,” says Conway, who first met Williams at Flagler and now runs a print shop and studio in the area. “It brings in people from all over the East Coast. A lot of them end up staying after they graduate, or they cycle in and out after going out on some journey.”

“Florida was really a bridge for Ty, in a lot of ways,” Conway continues. “He’s got these two polarities that define a lot of his work and his character: Maine and the Virgin Islands. When looking at his work, it can be hard to separate the Florida influence from the Caribbean. But I think Florida did provide him the physical and mental space to explore those two influences.”

“It was a place that allowed me to carve out my own little niche,” Williams says. “It happened really organically. Just being around a great group of people who were doing their own creative thing inspired me to hone in on the kinds of things I wanted to do.”

•

It’s my last afternoon in Maine, and the sun has finally broken through, scattering the gray clouds and fogbanks to reveal the coastline in all its Vacationland glory. A warm west-southwest wind continues to blow straight offshore as we wait for the tide situation to improve at a nearby spot. To kill time, in a last-ditch effort to get some color, I insist we pop into the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

We stare at Lee Krasner’s Lavender, one of the abstract expressionist’s vibrant, gesticulating neo-cubist efforts from 1942. It’s a dramatic and imploring piece. I ask Williams about the emotional state of his own representational figures. His people are usually in motion, dancing or carrying out a task of some import. Yet their countenance is blank, expressionless. 

“I definitely aim for contentment,” he says. “They’re doing the activity, but they’re not overselling the thing they’re doing. They’re going about their lives, doing the best they can. I think that’s all anyone could ask for. Content is enough.”

I’ve gotten the sense over the last three days that Williams is surprised by his own feelings of contentment. What does it mean for someone who is used to being in fairly constant motion to settle in? To be compelled to stop moving? 

“I don’t know what switched, except I got older and lived in other places,” he says of choosing to move back to Maine. “I just decided I want to be here and be a good steward of this place.”

We put in a couple more hours in the water after leaving the museum, milking the last of the swell before the tide starts to swamp things out. As we climb the rocks to reach the road, which provides a perfect in-profile view of the break, we run into the pioneering New England wave rider Sonny “Surfer Crow” Perkins, an increasingly rare and, according to Williams, thrilling sighting. 

“How many locals did you count out there?” Perkins shouts, surveying the lineup through binoculars. Williams starts listing names. 

“And you,” Perkins says, adding to Williams’ roll call. 

“Well, I’m really from up the road in Berwick,” he replies. 

Perkins pulls the binoculars from his eyes and smiles. “No, no,” he says. “You’re a local.” 

Williams is unusually quiet as we trudge back to his car.

[Feature artwork: SUN SEEKERS, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 inches. facing: The artist, drawing sharp and straight near home]