Antony Williams 2016

antony williams

antony williams new paintings 2016

text by

Andrea Gates

www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

antony williams 2016 Open, fluid brushwork in a painting can be like an ellipsis in a sentence, tempting our imagination, and even flattering our ability to fill in the blank of what the artist meant. In contemporary art we almost expect vagueness of execution and the impression of reciprocity between painter and viewer. Only relatively recently has it become acceptable to be bored or perplexed by sweeping abstraction, or by images that are more like gestures, and to say so out loud.

Nevertheless, a fair amount of contemporary painting still fits this description. One reason that this sort of style persists, ranging from the remarkable to the merely marked, is because the clichĂŠ endures that artists who have a physical relationship with paint are somehow more honest. By this reasoning, to be noteworthy an artist has to wrestle with the

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Natalia tempera on panel  36 x 33 cms 14 x 131⠄8 ins

brush; to challenge the limits of their canvas (limits invariably exceeded by the artist’s vision), and to test the materiality of paint. In other words, true artists trust fate and paint by the seat of their pants, making an art of making art. Such painters exist, of course, but the good ones are rare, to say the least.

Antony Williams is a different sort of painter.

To begin with, he paints in tempera, which, because it is fast drying and literally inflexible, necessarily demands precision. One of the most uncompromising and enduring of media, those very qualities made it particularly attractive to Arts and Crafts painters, whose nostalgia for traditional techniques compelled them to revive tempera painting with almost evangelical zeal.

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Reclining Nude on Camp Bed tempera on panel  97 x 107 cms 38 x 42 ins

Williams’s own work, while neither ornate nor obviously romantic, nonetheless has points of correspondence with the Arts and Crafts tradition, particularly in his richly detailed surfaces, which have the compressed power of a tapestry. Working with a tiny sable brush, he paints on prepared panels washed with yellow ochre, building his forms inch by square inch in countless, tiny crosshatched strokes of discrete colour. A close look at any of his forensically observed portraits reveals dense layers of translucent, hair-like brushstrokes; a typical area of skin is composed of distinctly layered strokes of terre-verte, Venetian red, raw umber and yellow ochre, a palette any early Renaissance painter could have used. “It’s quite a traditional way of painting flesh”, Williams explained. “Terre-verte is quite a

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Barry tempera on panel 46 x 41 cms 181⁄8 x 16 ins

cool colour so if you overlay it with a warmer tone, like Venetian red, they are working off each other.”

In fact, understanding the specific demands and possibilities of tempera is integral to his success as a painter. Initially, he embraced this medium because it requires painters to work methodically, building form incrementally: an approach that fitted with his previous experience as a painting and frame restorer. Moreover, as a rule, tempera involves working in hatched strokes and this linear handling also appealed to him: “It’s all about drawing, and working from observation suited that. I do like the optical properties of tempera too.” Unlike oil paint, its quick-dry nature discourages colour fusion, but tempera is more translucent. “I like that you can see what’s underneath; with tempera the original

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Beyond the Pines tempera 109 x 74 cms 42 7⁄8 x 291⁄8 ins

drawing is always present,” Williams explained, and in some works, such as Lemon Tree (cat. no.

7) and Beyond the Pines (cat. no. 4), lines of his initial study, painted in ivory black tempera, are clearly interwoven into the hatched colour layers that describe his forms. Another way he uses tempera’s needs to his advantage is in his limited palettes. “I think it’s best to keep [it] simple”, he said. “Otherwise, if you’ve mixed up an intricate flesh tone in a multitude of colours, and then you want to replicate that, it can be impossible.”

Moreover, tempera serves high-key palettes arguably better than oil (which can appear chalky) and can more accurately capture subtle natural effects, such as the half-toned and the weathered.

As a rule, Williams paints the deeply familiar in the

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Emma tempera on panel 69 x 56 cms 27 1⁄8 x 22 ins

cool, steady light of his Chertsey studio, mining long-known faces and objects for details that hint at something immeasurable below their methodically detailed surfaces. In fact, a consistent paradox of his portraiture is how he achieves pathos, or a sense of his sitter’s inner life, through such specific naturalism.

As Martin Gayford observed, Williams is one of the few figurative painters who avoids working from photographs, because he is ‘strongly attracted to the surface of things, and the details they contain’.

Tempera techniques encourage this level of attention, but Williams is also ‘interested in that extra information’ that only considerable time allows. Even his smaller portrait studies, like Natalia (cat. no. 1) and Barry (cat. no. 3) can require several months to

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Figure Lying by Water tempera on panel 137 x 109 cms 54 x 43 ins

complete, and larger works such as Reclining Nude on a Camp Bed (cat. no. 2) may take a year.

Obviously, there is no fixed constant when it comes to how much time an artist needs to complete a picture. Neither speed nor method is a virtue in itself, and art history is full of stories (true and otherwise) of artists either painting with notorious speed, or with such deliberation that they sometimes do not finish; they simply stop. But Williams believes his slow and considered approach to the subject matter allows him to see greater variation. “You get different information [because] things are different on different days. It’s a process that builds up…when you work with someone, it’s in flux all the time, and there’s more of a relationship as well.”

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Lemon Tree tempera on panel 47 x 46 cms 18 1⁄2 x 18 ins

Stylistically, the most obvious parallel with Williams’s painting is the work of Andrew Wyeth.

One of the most recognised figures in American art, Wyeth (1917–2009) is best known for Christina’s World (1948, MOMA New York), a large tempera study of a neighbour who lived in proud isolation at her farm in rural Maine. Wyeth was fascinated by Christina’s personality and physique – shaped as it was like an ancient root by illness and tenacity – and painted her several times. He also repeatedly painted his Pennsylvania neighbours: the Kuerners and, sensationally, Helga Testorf. In the popular imagination, Wyeth’s dry precision and timelocked atmospheres were held up as the epitome of Puritan resolve, one of the central images in American mythology, and at his height he was seen

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Margaret at Ninety-Six tempera on panel 38 x 56 cms 15 x 22 ins

as a welcome challenge to Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. But Wyeth saw himself as more of an abstractionist than a realist, precisely because he used detail to articulate the indistinct, arguing: “it’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side”.

Williams was of course aware of Wyeth, but it was only after 2006, when he saw a major exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that Wyeth began to influence his technique. When he subsequently returned to painting long-standing models, such as Antonia and his nonagenarian landlady, Margaret, Williams’s formerly more static surfaces became subtly alive with teeming brushstrokes. Likewise, in both his interior nudes, and figure-in-landscape subjects like Figure Lying

by Water (cat. no. 6) he adapted Wyeth’s high

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Girl with Dreadlocks tempera on panel 41 x 36 cms 16 x 14 ins

diagonals, creating within the flattened picture plane a shift from foreground to background that draws us into the painted space.

By the same token, his still lifes, which, with the exception of the occasional hardy citrus fruit, usually feature dried or inorganic objects, follow Eliot Hodgkin’s devotion to the ‘beauty of things that no one looks at twice’. Hodgkin, a deeply observant painter, chose tempera because he thought it uniquely expressed the character of certain objects (such as, in his own work, seed pods, bones, etc.) giving them ‘clarity and definition with a certain feeling of remoteness’. In discussing Williams’s work, Gayford pointed out: ‘If [he] is unusually sensitive to the parchment-like delicacy of skin, it is a sensitivity that extends to other items

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Antonia with Clenched Hand tempera on panel 80 x 94 cms 311⁄2 x 37 ins

around us. That probably explains the unexpected objects and surfaces that turn up in his still lifes – some of his most individual works.’

William’s paintings, particularly his portraiture, are, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, intensely private, but wholly transparent. Their inward-outward ‘Prufrock’ quality, the contrast between his utter objectivity and the subjectivity of what might lie beneath his sitter’s carefully detailed skin makes each painting read like a small, coherent world of its own making, shaping ‘the universe into a ball’ one tiny brushstroke at a time.

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Claw, Seed Head and Honesty

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Acanthus and Claw

tempera on panel 20 x 31 cms 7 7⁄8 x 12 1⁄4 ins

tempera on panel 25 x 34 cms 9 7⁄8 x 133⁄8 ins

Antony Williams (R.P. P.S. N.E.A.C.) Education: Farnham College and Portsmouth University.

Solo Exhibitions: Albemarle Gallery, London 1997 Sala Pares, Barcelona 1999 Messum’s, London 2000 Galeria Leandro Navarro, Madrid 2001 Petley Fine Art, London 2004 Messum’s, London 2009 Artur Ramon Gallery 2009 Messum’s, London 2013 Brian Sinfield Gallery, Burford 2014 Messum’s, London 2016 Awards: Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2012, Winner Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2007, Runner-Up Prize Arts Club Prize 2004, 2008 Discerning Eye Award for Still Life 1998 Ondaatje Award 1995, 2012 Carroll Foundation Award 1991, 1995 Changing Faces Prize 2010 Prince of Wales’s Award for Portrait Drawing 2014 Memberships: New English Art Club (elected 2007 Royal Society of Portrait Painters (elected 1996) Pastel Society (elected 2007) Commisions: HRH The Queen RT Hon Margaret Beckett MP Sir Donald Sinden Ömer Koç Amartya Kumar Sen Sir Alan Budd Collections: Viscount Portland Elaine and Melvin Merians House of Commons Garrick Club National Portrait Gallery Royal Society of Portrait Painters Queen’s College Oxford Private Collections in England, Rep. of Ireland and USA The Royal Collection Ömer Koç

Group Exhibitions: Threadneedle Figurative Prize, Mall Galleries, London 2008, 2012 Pastels Today, Southampton City Art Gallery 2008 Artonomy, Drawing Exhibition, Truro 2007 Lynn Painter – Stainers Prize, London 2007, 2012 Royal Society of Portrait Painters Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London 1995–2016 Pastel Society, Mall Galleries, London 1996, 2000, 2008–2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 BP Portrait Award Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, London 1995, 1998, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2015 Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Self – Portraits Exhibition, 2 Temple Place, London 2007 Great Britons, Treasures from the National Portrait Gallery, London at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, DC, 2007 The School of London and Their Friends (The Collection of Elaine and Melvin Merians) Yale Centre for British Art: New Haven, Connecticut 2000 Hunting Art Prize Exhibition, Royal College of Art 1998 Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London 1996, 1998, 2002 Royal Academy of Arts, London: Summer Exhibition 1992, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2014 Laing Art Competition Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London 1995 Waterman Fine Art, London 1995, 1996 Mercury Gallery, London 1994 New English Art Club, Mall Galleries, London 1992, 2007–2010, 2013, 2015 Royal Society of British Artists 1991 D-Day Portraits, Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2015 D-Day Portraits, Palace of Holyroodhouse, 2015–2016 Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize, 2015 Selected Bibliography: Oliver Lange, The Artist, March 2008 Brian Sewell, ‘How ugly can the faces get?’, Evening Standard, June 2007 Brian Sewell, Catalogue Introduction, Petley Fine Art, November 2004 Martin Gayford, Catalogue Introduction, Messums, November 2000 Laura Gascoigne, ‘Portrait of an inner self’, Artist & Illustrators, December 2000 Nicholas Usherwood, Galleries, December 2000 Julian Halsby, The Artist, May 1999 Antony J Lester, Antique Collecting, September 1998 Martin Gayford, The Spectator, November 1997 Martin Gayford, ‘Are our portrait painters all fingers and thumbs?‘ Daily Telegraph, October 1997 David Lee, Art Review, November 1997 Martin Gayford, Catalogue Introduction, Albemarle Gallery, October 1997 Sarah Boseley, ‘Queen- Warts and all’, The Guardian, May 1996 W F Deedes, ‘Portrait captures Queen’s troubles’, Daily Telegraph, May 1996 Nigel Reynolds, ‘Are these really the Queen’s hands?’, Daily Telegraph, May 1996 Artist and Illustrator, interview with Steve Pill, 2012.

Artist and Illustrator, Fresh paint section, Katie McCabe, 2016

Portrait Commissions

Now recognised as one of the foremost portrait artists of his generation, Antony Williams is also highly sought after for his private portrait commissions. Please contact Messum’s to enquire or arrange a consultation.

CDXII

ISBN 978-1-910993-04-0 Publication No: CDXII Published by David Messum Fine Art Š David Messum Fine Art

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