York Museum Gardens: Meet the former insurance broker turned artist who now runs one of Yorkshire's best gardens

In the week, Steve works as the garden manager of York Museum Gardens. When he gets home, a mile or so away, he switches to being an artist.

“I paint a lot of the time. I paint regularly to stay in the rhythm because that’s when the good stuff happens. I’ve got a certain amount of energy to burn, and I can paint pretty intensively for long periods of time.”

Steve is slight, shortish, and sparks with energy; he’s talkative and animated, witty too, with only a passing cloud of doubt. He worked in insurance until quitting 16 years ago. Asked if he’d had a crisis, he says: “Yeah, I had a mid-lifer.”

We are in the café at York Art Gallery on a crowded lunchtime. Amid the bustle and noise, Steve says he grew up in the Wirral, in an arty house. His father, Pete Williams, was a cartoonist for Private Eye and Punch, other magazines and the national press. His uncle, Mike Williams, was also a cartoonist.

“They grew up in Beatles-era Liverpool, Roger McGough, the poets, there was a bit of a buzz. He came through that and decided to become a cartoonist.”

At university Steve studied law, graduated without a plan, and ended up in insurance broking. He moved to York after he met his wife, Annabel. Their house had a greenhouse, and maybe that set something off in him.

“There are a couple of threads but it’s hard to give you a clear story.

I can make sense of it looking back, but at the time I didn’t have a clue. When I was young I was probably a bit arty. Ridiculously, I didn’t go and study art.”

He thought he needed a proper job. Did he regret that later?

“Yeah, I reckon I did. My path has led me here so there is something uplifting about seeing how I’ve changed direction. It might have been easier if I’d headed off there on day one.”

But he loves York.

“Just walking into the city centre I’m inspired. I don’t have to have a purpose. It’s nice just being in the city, isn’t it, being in the garden, and maybe doing what I do, I came to it later.”

Here’s another brushstroke: a holiday in the south of Ireland.

“I took loads of photos of this awesome sea. I’ve always had a connection with the sea, growing up on the Wirral. And I don’t how, I can’t explain this bit, but I ended up getting a small artist’s pad, and some pastels or maybe some paint, and just started sketching the sea, instinctive painting.”

He is “emotionally driven”, saying: “I paint my feeling of whatever it is, landscape, seascape. If a building’s got a soul, like the Minster, I can paint it.”

He self-studied art and plunged into the Impressionists.

“Everybody likes Monet, Van Gogh, Sisley, Pissarro, all those guys. I’d look at how they painted, and this was about their impressions of what they painted, and that’s what was groundbreaking at the time.”

He also liked “abstract stuff, north American, 1950s onwards, Hans Hofman”.

Steve is drawn to painting the sea and has spent hours on the Yorkshire coast, loving that the sea is never the same.

“If I’m by the sea, all of life’s little niggles kind of recede, you’re left with the waves coming in and out, as they’ve been doing for eons.”

Steve’s bright and vivid paintings sell well – “That’s great and helps with the mortgage” – and will be familiar to anyone who has visited his house during York Open Studios.

Kevin Bradshaw of NGalleries, in Helmsley, is his sole representative. He says he is “drawn to Steve because his work is very embedded in the local area, and he represents the countryside and coast of North Yorkshire. He’s also a really nice guy, and that helps”.

The gallery is behind Steve’s new exhibition at the Worsley Arms hotel in Hovingham, a joint show with Harrogate artist Steve Thompson.

New paintings have been inspired by Hovingham woods, York Minster, and Robin Hood’s Bay, among other locations.

Steve’s art has changed. He used to paint in a representational way, painting from photographs.

“That to me is a great hand-to-eye coordination exercise, and some people really like that. But for me it’s about the emotional connection or whatever,” he says.

And painting is his release.

“Some people do yoga, some people meditate, and what I’ve found is something… I’m struggling to describe it. I’m not at peace because painting can be incredibly frustrating, and incredibly rewarding, but it’s a challenge, there’s a flow, I lose myself in the flow in a way, and I guess that’s meditative.”

As for the gardening, Steve studied for his Royal Horticultural Society exams in the evening.

“Not that I expected to train in horticulture or become a gardener, but there was a point, one of those surprises people have, where Annabel was ill, and then got the all-clear. It just made me think about what I am doing, a bit of an existential crisis, I’ve had a couple of existential crises that I’ve somehow run with, you know, what’s life about, what am I doing, is this how I want to spend my time.”

He gave up his insurance job with the promise of not very much.

“I tried to fight that thought for a couple of years, and there was a point where I handed back the company car, let go of all that stuff, and took a seasonal job at Beningbrough Hall.”

He then worked in the gardens at Newby Hall for five years. “I wanted to learn about plants and got really excited about apples and became a bit of an apple nerd.”

There are worse sorts of nerds to be.

Our table in the café is needed, so we head outside to the edible garden in Museum Gardens. We sit on a bench, watched by a robin. Sirens rip the air in the distance, but this place feels calmly set apart.

“What I want to do is create drama in here. It feels quite cossetted,” Steve says. “Some people in horticulture look at the perfection of a single plant, they’re called plantsmen. I like playing with landscape and bringing colour together and flow.”

He aims to be environmentally and wildlife friendly, planting wildflowers, increasing biodiversity, bringing in unusual plants and trees.

“With up to 1.5 million people going through the gardens every year, that’s hard for wildlife. You need to build up habitat, leave areas of grass to grow long, nests for hedgehogs.”

Steve tells some passing visitors that the ‘pears’ they are looking at are quinces, then thanks a man for plucking out a weed.

In parting, he says: “It’d be nice for the people who employ me, York Museums Trust, to say that we’re a charity and if anybody would like to make a donation to help keep the gardens looking beautiful, that would be amazing.”