Antonia Williams is a mistress of understatement. When we met her on the recommendation of our website friend and champion Paul Rees of the Algarve Daily News, we were simply told she did “fun things with portraits, which she runs first through an App”. We were given no inkling as to the lady artist’s other talents – which include the enviable ability to “do a Monet in about a week”. She’s good with Turner, too. Brueghel, Vermeer, in fact almost any Old Master or contemporary giant you could care to mention, with the exception perhaps of Jackson Pollock. “I wouldn’t be able to get the spontaneity”…
Today this doyenne of the copyist world (they never call themselves fakers or forgers) lives much of the time in bohemian old-town Olhão – and yes, she does do fun things with portraits. She has a selection on show now at the Cantaloupe bar on the seafront by the fish market, and they’re very funny.
But the lady who has described herself in a previous newspaper interview as “an artistic chameleon” has other irons in the fire.
On her trips back to UK she invariably finds herself running up an Old Master for a Saudi client, or otherwise filling “vast expanses of empty walls” for commissions deposited in her very capable lap by upmarket architects and interior designers.
“It’s fun”, she says simply. “It’s a change from doing my own stuff, and it is always a challenge, which is good”.
She lets slip that she “also has a website”. Discovering it after the interview, we find it filled with fantastical images – surrealism with a hefty dollop of black comedy, stunning interiors and weird and wonderful still lives.
Antonia Williams is so much more than someone who “does something fun with portraits”!
But back to the Monets and Turners and Vermeers, are they really unmistakable from the originals?
“I’d like to think that they are, yes”, she considers. “Obviously, I write “after Monet”, or whatever on the back – but they should look exactly like the originals. I use proper linen canvases, and for a Turner, for instance, build up all the layers as they did in those days, using scumbles and glazes.
“For a Vermeer I was commissioned to do, I even incorporated sand in the buildings. I went to the Hague to research his techniques”.
Completely at home with Monet (“I’ve done dozens of them”), Antonia was quoted in The Independent eight years ago, saying: “I like to think that if Monet walked into the studio he’d think that my painting was one of his”.
As to being fast (able to knock one out “in about a week”), she agreed: “that’s fast but, after all, Monet was turning out two or three in the same time”.
Very happy these days in Olhão, this artistic chameleon is thinking about the future.
She would like to develop her wacky portraits “but I would like to concentrate on couples. And the idea, really, is to tell a story. They’re a bit naughty, in that respect. They show sides of people that perhaps they are not aware of themselves, or don’t mean to show”…
“In a way, I feel I am at the end of my painting life now”, she adds suddenly. “I would like to paint a “great painting” before I die”.
Ms Williams looks everything BUT at the end of any kind of life. She gives every impression of being a highly perceptive energetic artist with a keenly developed sense of irreverent humour.
We should all be on our toes; very careful indeed.
A word of warning to anyone she approaches for one of her “fun portraits”: get your “story” straight before she starts!
For an eye-opening look at Antonia Williams’ variety of styles and techniques, visit: http://antoniawilliams.com/
By Natasha Donn
