Arrested Motion has a terrific interview with one of our favorite artists, Antony Micallef .

Here’s an excerpt:

AM: The faces of your subjects are often smudged, even disfigured. Are you attempting to hide part of the subject?

Ant: It’s funny because when I draw, most of the things that get destroyed are the heads. I’ll keep drawing and drawing and these things just blossom. This might sound a bit weird, but the way I visualize the piece in my head is that you see this face coming towards you from under the surface of water. I’ll probably get about 5 come up before I get the one I want. I might try and tweak them, but end up destroying them and then you have to carry on working until something else comes up.

It’s quite good to have a camera phone to take pictures of the work, but then the pictures you take aren’t hi-res. Some of the heads I’ll think are ok, I won’t need to take a picture. Then, I tweak it a little but then it’s just gone completely and changed into something else.

I don’t think it’s about trying to hide beauty, but I’m trying to find something else rather than just looking at a head. I always use my own head as the structure, but I never see them as me. I suppose a few of them when they come out might look like me and they are more like self portraits.

AM: So are you conceiving the bone structure and the skull and building the paint up from there?

Ant: Yeah, it’s like starting with a scaffolding and then I want to flesh it out. The heads have their own identities that come out during the process. They just arrive.

Read the whole interview here.