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BeaufortLifestyle.com | June 2026 17%u201cIf a painting has been sleeping for 80 or 90 years, you can%u2019t wake it up suddenly,%u201d Clyde Williams says softly over a cup of coffee at Urban Brew + Co. %u201cYou have to let it wake on its own. Listen, and it will speak to you. It will dictate what needs to be done.%u201d For Clyde, restoration is both art and science, a careful balance of technical skill and intuition that allows him to work in conversation with the original artist, the object and the passage of time. It%u2019s an approach that has served him well at Art Restoration by Clyde, a Beaufort-based business that he has built over 35 years. Clyde grew up on Congress Street in downtown Beaufort, one of five children in a family with deep roots in the community. He and his sister Norma were the youngest, and he says that art found him early. %u201cMy mother, she would draw a picture of this lady, and she would do it the same way every time,%u201d he says. %u201cWhenever I had a bad day, I would say, could you draw that lady?%u201d With a laugh, he adds, %u201cAs an artist myself, I started with stick people. Then they gained weight.%u201d When spelling did not come easily, images did. Clyde remembers turning a simple grocery list into a series of pictures, with each item translated visually instead of written out. Even the family home became a place of experimentation. %u201cI started doing artwork on the house we were raised in,%u201d he says. %u201cThey found out it was me when I got older and was too big to be in trouble.%u201d He enjoyed art classes in high school, where classmates told him he was more talented than the teacher. Like many teenagers, he also liked spending time at the football games, where he met a young woman named Claudia who twirled a rifle with the school%u2019s color guard. He asked her out. They dated for just two months before Clyde moved away, and although he did return to Beaufort after his high school graduation, he didn%u2019t see Claudia again for 40 years. The reconnection came unexpectedly when Clyde stopped at a salon where Norma was having her hair done. Her beautician turned out to be the same woman he%u2019d fallen for as a teenager, and today, they are married. When Clyde first returned to Beaufort, he found work as a cook and believed that would be his career. He had no idea he would reunite with Claudia one day %u2014 or become a master of art restoration and conservation. One day, he came across a newspaper ad placed by William Leon Stacks (1928-1991), a Hilton Head-based artist and conservator who was looking for a picture framer. An American Expressionist known for his Lowcountry landscapes and his work as a teacher and mentor, Stacks hired Clyde to handle basic cleaning and framing. Then the artist became ill, and some restoration projects stalled. Stacks%u2019 wife, Gloria, recommended sending the work to Atlanta. Clyde had a different idea. %u201cI thought, why would we send it out?%u201d he says. %u201cSo I finished it myself. He cried. He didn%u2019t understand how I%u2019d done it, because he never showed me.%u201d From that moment, the work shifted. Gloria Stacks took over the business side of the operation while Clyde handled the restoration projects, a role he stepped into without fully realizing its significance. %u201cI didn%u2019t see the big deal, but Leon and everyone else thought it was,%u201d he says. %u201cIt didn%u2019t even feel like work to me.%u201d