Born to working-class parents and mainly self-taught, ROXANA HALLS tells Niki Browes why the feeling of performance is so important in the act of painting
ROXANA HALLS GREW UP wanting to be an actress, and her love of drama is obvious in the theatricality of much of her work. She did a foundation course in art, but spent most of her time at home, painting by herself. Fellow students probably suspected she’d dropped out until she turned up at the end-of-year show with a haul of work she’d created.
At the age of 17, she moved alone from Devon to London and established her first studio in a former theatre in south London. Her work is now in many private and public collections, in the UK and abroad, and she was featured in the BBC’s Extraordinary Portraits, painting twin sisters who survived a crocodile attack in Mexico. She was also commissioned by Disney to create the Stretching Room paintings for the film Haunted Mansion, realeased earlier this year.
Roxana is one of the co-founders of InFems, a dynamic all-women art collective with a mission to empower women and girls from diverse backgrounds. roxanahalls.com ▸
I visualise my paintings rather as though I’m storyboarding a scene from a film.
I ‘cast’ people I know in roles. They have a costumed character to play and we discuss the mise en scene, the moments preceding the call of action. I’ve played so many characters in my self-portraiture and have always felt that having a willingness to explore roles within oneself can give you an enormous licence to break a further range of confines. There is a feeling of performance in the act of painting, the canvas as a stage you return to, wondering each time if you’ll pull it off; if you can keep in character and remember your lines. But maybe it’s more like a series of rehearsals where you’re building towards opening night when all the underlying travails are unseen and unknown, and the play is the thing.
My painting style has changed enormously but, in many respects, all the seeds of change were always in evidence.
My earlier work was at times intensely sombre, my palette was darker and my imagery seeped in melancholy: I painted from life, figures and still lives. I looked to the Masters and sought to learn my craft. But there was always something aslant in me: flashes of exuberance, indecorousness, like inappropriate eruptions of laughter, an uncontainable wish to take things further. This ultimately led to the point where I came to understand that painting knows best. When I was younger, I was riddled with doubt about wh
