Antoinette Mangion

The gifts I always asked for as a child were pencils, pens, ink and paper. I knew myself to be an artist from the outset, but was discouraged in my efforts to make it a career path. Apart from a brief, incomplete, youthful foray into studying Art & Design at Portsmouth College of Art, I am self-taught.

I paint mostly with acrylic and oils onto canvas, clayboard or reinforced papers. I use graphite, colour pencils and experiment with painting paper for collage, wax resist, watercolour or water colour pencils for practice work and sketchbook studies. I challenge myself by trying my hand at a variety of different subjects and methods of mark- making but find by far that I am most satisfied with my figurative work, rendered in acrylics and, or, oils, featuring people, reflective elements and still-life subjects.

There is no single element that inspires me to paint a subject, but I am mostly compelled by the effects of light on a subject. In recent years I developed a preference for painting subjects in a limited colour palette. All the paintings displayed here reflect a palette choice of a maximum of three primary colours plus a white. I create the greys, blacks & every shade in between from these limited pigment choices.

My painting process is layering thick on thin and occasionally using any tool at hand, like knives, plastic, sponges, q-tips, fingers. to sculpt out the desired effect. I stick to a firm plan in the early stages of a painting i.e palette colours and foundation sketch. I start by brushing in a rough acrylic sketch over the ground to position the important elements and tones of the subject. After that, anything can happen. I get lost in the process which plays out differently for every painting. I keep a photographic or video record of the progress of a painting so that I can go back and break down the choices that took me from uncertain trajectory to a painting that is credible for me.

My portrait titled 'Dipping' was pre-selected for the 2010 BP Portrait prize, the same work was shortlisted the following year for A&I 2011 Artist of the Year Award (Portrait Award. My portrait titled 'Tyra', formed in oils on acrylic sketch and ground. was pre-selected for the 2014 Threadneedle Prize