Messums London presents a body of intense studio observations by painter Antony Williams that could more generally be called still lives. This new collection painted in his signature egg tempera.
Painting in egg tempera requires a level of patience that most would find challenging. The speed at which the medium dries means that only the smallest of brushstrokes can be used, and the direction of every mark must be carefully thought out. For this reason, tempera has been largely abandoned over the past 500 years in favour of the fluidity and flexibility of oil paint. In contemporary art it is rarer still. However, an artist who has not only embraced tempera but has become one of the most prominent exponents of the medium for the 21st century is Antony Williams.
With meticulous attention to detail, Williams creates images which evoke a feeling of contemplation and stillness, moments frozen in time. Although portraiture has long been his primary focus, in this most recent series of works, Williams turns his attention to still life in an intriguing group of paintings which treat inanimate objects from the artist’s own home and garden with the same scrutiny and compositional delicacy as his portraits. The images intersperse items such as children’s toys with objects found in nature – bird skeletons, shells, twigs and leaves, for example. The paintings are quiet, contemplative, beautifully observed, but also playful in their often-surreal associations. They have a feeling of domesticity about them, both in their intimacy and in elements their subject matter.
Key to Williams’ paintings is his draftsmanship, which is as meticulous and sensitive as his brushwork – indeed, his work has been selected ten times for the BP Portrait Award (winning a prize in 2018), and he was awarded first prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award in 2024.
