Antony Williams

Antony Williams has long set the quality bar, higher than most of us dream to reach.
Its not the mere millions of tiny , delicate, translucent brushed marks of tempera.
Not just the immensely emotionally charged, tense regard and atmosphere of the sitters.
Each paintbrush seems to harvest the true substance of matter. Hardly realistic, since realism is ever that saturated. One looks at a face, fixing a detail at one time, not the ensemble.
Antony's almost schizophrenic approach to painting, grafts skin, veins, scars, light, texture.
Its almost an intent to possess.
I love his patient technique, his dialogue with materials.
In a complete different aesthetic, George Tooker, used to take the same patience with tempera.
Antony is a painter's painter. He cherishes the process, he is methodical, contrived, spartan almost, in the crafting of his master pieces.
A minimal, reduced palette (in the manner of masters) of tempera: yellow ochre, genuine vermilion, cadmium red deep, Venetian red, terre verte, titanium white and ivory black.
All colors deriving from that.

"Once I have transferred the drawing from the prepared charcoal study onto the gesso board, which I do freehand, I usually start the painting by applying a yellow ochre wash across the entire picture area. This deadens the rather powerful effect of the white surface. I then work in a tonal way, using diluted black tempera paint and aiming to recreate all the tonal variations that were stated in the original drawing. Next, for portraits and figure subjects, as an underpainting for the flesh tones, I cover most of the panel with a layer of terre verte, even across areas that aren't going to be flesh-coloured.

Although this colour is applied in a slightly broader way, nevertheless the process continues to rely on relatively small brushes, perhaps sizes 2 or 3, and small touches of colour all over. Therefore each layer takes quite a time to complete. The next step is to add Venetian red over the green, and then I start to model the flesh tones, mostly working with a mixture of white and yellow ochre.

Then, all the time considering the different light and dark values, I continue to build up the effect with various colour mixes, perhaps even occasionally adjusting an area by painting over it with some terre verte mixed with white. You have to remember that all of these colours are translucent, and so the final effect depends on the sequence of colours and how these have been applied.

The brushmarks gradually become smaller and more refined as the painting develops, so that eventually I am concentrating on the details of the eyes, mouth and so on, and probably working with a 5/0 brush.

At any stage I may decide to introduce a wash across a certain area in order to darken it or soften its impact. Unlike watercolour or gouache, once applied the paint is fairly permanent and thus it won't be disrupted by any subsequent layers. In fact, after several months it becomes fully permanent. However, this does mean that it is more difficult to make alterations. You can, of course, paint over an area, or indeed scrub paint off, although this is rather a drastic step.

I think my work has been influenced by quite a number of artists, perhaps especially Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow and Andrew Wyeth. And I have also studied some of the old masters such as Piero della Francesca.

For me, one of the attractions of egg tempera is that if you work in the classic way, with a succession of thin, translucent layers of colour, you can achieve a wonderfully sensitive and luminous quality — a quality that is unique among the painting media. However, it is a difficult medium to use out of doors, so for future projects, in which I hope to include the figure in a landscape, this is a problem I will need to overcome!"

We await...

Antony Williams's self portrait