A pleasure to see Victor Willing’s huge lyrical paintings in such an architecturally appropriate setting. The fabulously colourful canvases sat so well in the gallery environment that the framing within the compositions merged with the framing of the architectural spaces of Hastings Contemporary as in the image left, of Cythère.

 

Having visited Paula Rego’s retrospective in Milton Keynes in the summer, it was great to see the work of her husband and to understand a story so contrary to the one so often told in the History of Art. Willing was the golden boy at the Slade and was immediately taken up by the Hanover Gallery London on leaving college. Eventually leaving London to go and live with Paula Rego (at that time his ‘mistress’, he was married to someone else) in Portugal, he had a difficult isolated time there while Paula painted. Eventually seeking the opinion of Andrew Forge on a number of recent canvases he’d rolled up and taken to London himself, he was told the work was no good, this voiced his own fears and that crippled him for twenty years or so. Back in London with Paula in the early 1970s, penniless and taking drugs for his Multiple Sclerosis which had been diagnosed in the late 1960s, he began working tirelessly on what were to become his most famous and successful works. These huge visionary paintings, apparently sprung fully formed in his mind – visions perhaps induced by his MS medication.

 

The resulting works are formidable, huge with an amazing sense of colour and composition. Surrealist in their content, of empty clothes swinging on swings, or whale tails appearing out of the floor, the ominous subject matter is off-set by the vibrant colour palette, the scale of the works and the lusty, cheerful confidence found in the painting itself.  This painterly confidence gives, the limbs lying bodiless on the beach and the red feathers standing unnaturally upright, a joyful intrigue and  turns them from brooding nightmares into non-threating but nevertheless intriguing dreams.