Biography
English painter and draughtsman of Egyptian birth. Having moved with his family to England in 1932, he studied at the Guildford School of Art (1948–9), and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1949–54). As a student he met Francis Bacon and admired the work of Picasso and Matisse. His early paintings such as Standing Nude (c. 1952–3; London, Tate Gal.), are figurative. In 1957 he moved to Portugal with Paula Rego, whom he married in 1959. He painted very little during his time in Portugal and subsequently destroyed much of the work of that period. When he and his family returned to London in 1974, settling permanently there, he began to paint again as a way of supporting himself. The paintings from the late 1970s were made after hallucinating the images, possibly a side-effect from the drugs he was taking at the time for multiple sclerosis. The triptych Place (1976–8; see Bradley, pp. 72–3), made during this period, includes much of the vocabulary used in subsequent paintings. The central panel shows a chair on a makeshift platform, a shelter within a bare room. On the left-hand panel is a wall with geometric drawings on it; on the right-hand panel is a large plant. As in many of Willing's paintings, a situation is presented as a scene to be played out by an absent protagonist. Primitive shelters and furniture, as settings suggestive of the isolation of the artist, are motifs that he explored in many works of this time. Willing also drew, not only preparatory sketches, but finished works, on a smaller scale than the large paintings, as in Untitled 14.12.82 (1982; Cambridge, U. of Cambridge, Kettle's Yard), which shows an unstable pile of objects in a bleak landscape. In the 1980s Willing was recognized as an important and established artist, but his health was worsening. He painted on a smaller scale at this time, with a series of women's heads being the last series that he completed before his death from multiple sclerosis. Some of these, such as Españo (1987; see Bradley 2000, p. 114), were clearly conceived in homage to Picasso.