A former UK basketball player is widely known for his skills off the court.

Lavonne Williams Jr played at UK on the 1978 team that won the national championship.

Since then, he's crafted a name for himself in the world of art.

More in tonight's Tapestry segment.

I've always loved art more so than anything else I've ever done.

Growing up as a kid, you know, we didn't have much money.

My brother was a woodcarver and so my brother, he would always make toys, he would make cars, He would make, you know, soldiers.

And then he would make just like any kind of thing that he wanted to.

And that was what we play with My grandmother and my mother would tell stories through art from the quilts that my grandmother made and my mother made.

That's what influenced me the most.

People look at my work and they see it and they don't understand.

It's just a big quilt.

It's a quilt carved into wood.

There's a certain raw component to the work.

You can kind of see where his hand has passed over the work, whether he's carving or he's drawing onto the canvas or the wood.

You can just really see that he has put himself into it.

We were just getting the gallery up and running again after the lockdown and I was looking for artists.

He was commissioned to do an installation in our bookshelf and I just happened to kind of come across him when he came in and he showed me one of his drawings, and I asked our BWC coordinator who he was.

I had seen some of his work and I thought he would be a really, really good fit for the space.

So I just decided to kind of get in contact with him and see if he wanted to do a show.

When I went to his studio to start looking at his work, I was just kind of utterly floored because he has so much work because he just he's just constantly making things.

This work that you see here at this gallery right now.

It was just sitting in the back closet.

And then Zach Hall came.

He saw what he liked and he pulled it out.

And I see, I see what he what he's done with the work.

I mean, it is like, amazing.

I started out in this gallery, my major show was at this gallery.

So this is like coming home.

What I hope they take away is like the artistry of it, the craft of it, and also the dedication.

Because to me, you want to be a student, you want to be a teacher, you want to be a master.

And now I feel like I reach mass and status.

My hope is that younger artists get inspired by the work here.

It's really easy as a young artist to get discouraged when you see other people's artwork and you think to yourself, like, I will never, you know, I'll never be able to make something like that.

That's that's just that's just too good.

And I think what's great about this work is like some works are part of a long career that he's had.

I think you can see that through working hard and through just kind of that continual study and that desire to learn and get better.

You know, you can reach that higher place as an artist.

Williams work has been featured at the Hickory Museum of Art, New York's Outsider Art Fair, and at the Kentucky Folk Art Center.