After his successful solo, Happy Deep Inside My Heart, at Lazarides’ Rathbone Place last year, Antony Micallef (interviewed) will be featured in a smaller showing at The Outsiders tomorrow night, March 8th. A Little Piece of Me will comprise of ten new examples of the London-based artist’s ongoing Head series. These works aren’t studies per say, but they are used by Micallef to get his creative juices flowing before plunging into a new body of work.
See what he has to say about these particular set of paintings after the jump…
“When someone buys one of my head paintings, it’s the biggest compliment of all. They don’t contain any of the distractions that my larger paintings contain. If somebody buys one, it’s not about the colour of the picture matching their designer apartment, and they’re not buying it according to the message, trend or latest fashion either. They’re buying it purely for the painting, for the marks I’ve made on the canvas. These Heads are simply about looking. It’s me, alone, with just a mirror. But the intention isn’t to make a self-portrait. Instead, it’s to capture an emotion. I look at my own head as simply a method to help find these faces from within the paper, to purge them out. I feel it’s important to paint from life while I’m creating these Heads, as it’s the only way to capture a visceral, fleeting glimpse that can be impossible to obtain from a photograph. To me, the Head studies are like pummelling a steak before you cook it. Kneading and abstracting the flesh. The end result is never known before I begin. The mark making creates the expression of the face, changing it with each stroke. I’m constantly picking up the canvas, turning it around, trying to control the drips and then throwing it down. This is a very different process from doing some of the other larger, more considered pieces that I create.”
Discuss Antony Micallef here.
