“That’s one of the benefits of being an artist.
I can be
incredibly self-indulgent and just say, it’s my job!”
Antony Micallef
Apart from being an affluent
suburb of London, Notting Hill is the title of the Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant
romantic comedy about which film critic Robin Clifford
wrote “Hollywood has reached a new level of movie star indulgence.” Notting Hill
is also where British artist Antony
Micallef calls home.
The balcony of his
flat, just off the Portobello Road, is his favored place to give interviews to
journalists after their Cook’s tour of his exceeding messy studio. It is almost
a parody of his works about the vacuous nature of our modern consumer lifestyle
that consolidated Micaffef’s fame after gaining second prize in the 2000 BP
Portrait Award.
But as he told the Telegraph
newspaper’s Andrew Perry in the lead up to his 2011 exhibition Happy Deep
Inside My Heart “I’m sucked in by it
just like everyone else. I’m guilty of all the things I paint about. I’m part
of the problem. This show is about me realizing that I’ve become the sludge,
the slush. I have to be honest in my painting.”
As his journey as an artist continues Micallef’s search for
honesty has seen his style change from the graphic illustrative aspect of his
earlier works to the painterly involvement of the contemporary expressionist.
As he says “I want to say it all with the actual medium this time without
illustrating it. I wanted the luscious density of the paint itself to describe
the feeling without narrating it.”
The freedom that having ‘A’ list collects such as Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie enables Micallef to
concentrate on his work without the need for a day job. A necessity considering
a painting may take up to 10 hours of sustained effort in one session. As he
told Notting Hill & Holland
Park Magazine’s Hannah Lemon “I hate using the word trance, it’s such a cliché
but you are definitely in a state where you don’t feel the cold; you’re playing
an album and you don’t hear the music. You are just really engaged.”
This doesn't mean Micallef has given up on his indulgences.
He recently purchased a 1910 chandelier that once graced the stately halls of a
Lake Como villa for his flat; a treat for himself after his last show. As he
explained to the Telegraph’s
lifestyle section’s My Space “In my work, I like
mixing in classical things with contemporary imagery, and I do it at home too.
Contrast is what makes things interesting.”
Micallef’s exhibition Self, a series of self portraits, is
currently on show at London’s Lazarides
Rathbone until the 19th of March.
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