Interview by Richard McClure
Winner of the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024, Antony Williams has a long association with the National Portrait Gallery, having exhibited at the Portrait Award on eleven occasions, notably in 2017 when he received third prize. This year’s winning entry, Jacqueline with Still Life, is a portrait of a professional artist’s model painted at his former studio on Platts Eyot, an island on the River Thames, shortly before he was forced to move out of the increasingly dilapidated building.
Jacqueline was originally employed as a model by the artist’s wife, Caroline Bays, who is also exhibiting at this year’s Portrait Award, and was first painted by Williams a decade ago.
Leaving the studio was a difficult decision as it had provided a lot of inspiration for my work, including the paintings of Jacqueline, he says.
“I often work with certain models over an extended period. There is something mysterious about Jacqueline’s face that fascinates me: The portrait was completed over a dozen sittings, with Jacqueline posed in front of his studio’s bay window and pictured in natural light reflected off the Thames. ‘I could easily have painted her clothed, but I conceived it as a naked portrait partly as a way to convey a vulnerability; he explains. ‘The issue of the male gaze is certainly something a contemporary male artist needs to consider when painting a female model, but I believe it is a tradition that can continue and have relevance if it is approached with respect!
Williams paints almost exclusively in egg tempera – a quick-drying medium of egg yolk binder, powdered pigments and water that he favours for depicting the subtleties of skin and texture. He begins with a detailed drawing on paper in either charcoal or pencil, which he then transfers onto a gesso panel before applying a painstaking succession of small, deliberate brushstrokes to build up layer upon layer of paint. ‘It’s a semi-pointillist technique, but a realist way of seeing’, he says.
Having dropped out of art school in the 1980s, Williams is largely self-taught. Living in Chertsey, Surrey, he is currently vice president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and his intensely observed compositions are held in collections around the world, including a 1996 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that caused controversy at the time for its uncompromising representation of ageing and mortality. Lucian Freud was an early influence, while his most recent paintings signal his regard for the ‘strong narrative content’ found in Balthus and Paula Rego, as well as a new-found engagement with still life, a consequence of the pandemic when ‘it became difficult to work with people’ In 2021, he held his first exhibition of still lifes at Cork Street gallery Messums London, where several works featured the same plastic dinosaur, fan and toy houses that we see in his study of Jacqueline.
Like some of the people I paint repeatedly, I am now doing the same with objects. For Jacqueline with Still Life, my idea was to combine a figure with a still life element but give both equal importance in order to create an implied narrative. Originally, my work was all about observing and recording the truth. Now, I’m more interested in creating narrative elements and moving towards a more surrealist approach.’
Text courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
