42 Artists & Illustrators
IN THE STUDIO
Before the painting begins, Ania
pre-mixes large amounts of six
different skin tones, ranging from
shadow colours to pinkish whites. She
scrapes each of them up and stores
them in piping bags more commonly
used for icing cakes, ready to squeeze
out onto her palette and modulate
subtly with dashes of different colours.
Colour mixing hasn’t always come
naturally to Ania. After graduating in
fine art from Ipswich University and
studying briefly at the Prince’s Drawing
School, she spent three weeks at the
Florence Academy of Art in Italy in
2014 with the aim of improving her
skills in this respect. “I just felt that
my portraits were quite dead looking,”
she explains. “I wasn’t really using
any pinks or greens or blues in the
right sort of shades, I was just literally
improvising as I was going along.”
Ania favours Winsor & Newton and
Michael Harding oil paints, reserving
the latter for her faces due to their
high pigmentation. She adds Beeswax
Impasto medium to thicken the oils
and create a matt finish. She applies
them with hard bristle brushes that
she has been trying to look after
better. “But now I’ve been really
cleaning them, they’re almost too soft
for me to use. It’s a battle.”
By breaking stereotypes, honing
her skills and working hard to devise
new perspectives, Ania has managed
that most tricky of feats: developing a
distinctive style that is uniquely herown. Yet despite having already won
the National Portrait Gallery’s Young
Artist Award and exhibited at the
Venice Biennale, the 29-year-old is
reluctant to talk about ambitions.
“I like to take things step by step,” she
says. “I don’t really want to sort of set
this huge goal of being in the biggest
museum of contemporary art or
something. That’s everyone’s dream I
think, it’s just a case of slowly does it,
take your time. If you set yourself up
for a goal and you don’t reach it, you’re
going to think everything is not worth
it.” While her modesty is admirable,
the works in her forthcoming
exhibition suggest Ania has every
reason to start dreaming big.
Ania’s next exhibition runs from
14 March to 4 June at Catto Gallery,
London NW3. http://www.aniahobson.comRIGHT Untitled
(Small Face), oil on
canvas, 30x30cm
FAR RIGHT
The Meet-Up,
oil on canvas,
160x180cm
BELOW Park, oil on
canvas, 90x140cm