Art Review November issue 2000.
Artist Profile
by Charlotte Mullins

Antony Micallef works as a graphic designer by day and as an artist by night - his paintings are the result of this working crossover, with bold graphics interlinking with strong fleshy figures. "If I'm comfortable with an image I find in a magazine I'll use it in a painting," he says. "I take my inspiration from everywhere." But this wasn't always the case. "My earlier work always contained a single figure," he says, "and generally I focussed on portraying the identity and emotions of the figure and nothing else. They would always appear naked to express vulnerability and always had a sense of neurotic discomfort about them".

Micallef came to painting at an early age, studying fine art at the University of Plymouth where he fell in love with the work of "two amazing flesh painters", Caravaggio and Valazquez, as well as benefiting from his tutors' support. "I was very lucky to have been taught by some tutors who really made an impression on me and encouraged," he says. "It's important to be taught by artists who have a real passion for what they do because you can feed off their love of making art." His own passion was painting the figure, working on solitary figures until he visited Japan in 1999.

Japan was a complete visual overload for me," he says. "It allowed me to find my self as a painter and come to terms with what I'm interested in and what excites me as a visual artist. I've always been interested in fashion, graphics, music and popular culture, and for years wanted to incorporate this into my work, but wasn't sure how to or how to justify it to my self." The neon pink and blues of street sighns, the shopfronts and packaging of local supermarket products all became compulsive viewing to Micallef: "I found myself buying 'Hello Kitty milk cartons only so I could take the packaging home to my studio."

His work continued to feature the figure, but now he started to weave  in fragments of neon signs, 
packaging and cartoon characters creating urban landscapes for his figures to exist in.
Although each person is based on himself, micallef doesn't like calling them self-portraits.
"When I look at my paintings I don't see me but an 'identity' I have captured within the paint," he says.
"When I begin painting a face it feels like I'm facing for marks randomly, trying to catch an expression
of a character,an identity." He doesn't even consider himself a portrait painter even though at the 
age of 24, he has just won second prize in this year's BP Portrait Award, Currently on Tour at
Aberdeen Art Gallery. "I never saw myself as a portrait painter, but still thought I had something 
new to offer with my figurative way of working, and BP award was always an exhibition I wanted to get into.
To me it represented recognition and success." And now he has it.