The Jamaican-born British artist Anthony Daley migrated to the United Kingdom in early adolescence and studied painting at Chelsea College of Arts, emerging in the early 1980s with a strangely capacious technique that confirmed him as being in possession of rare painterly skill. Across a span of four decades, his increasingly celebrated oeuvre has grown outward from the hermetic laboratory of his studio into vast, immersive canvases that are now housed in prestigious public and private repositories across the UK, the Caribbean and Europe.

His visual idiom is arguably allied to the mastery of the old academies, but Baroque drama and Renaissance composure are not so much fetishised as utilised as scaffolding in his work – recasting chiaroscuro, layered glazing, and the measured architecture of composition to sustain an aspiration toward transcendence. Upon these vast and luminous canvases, the impulsive nature of abstract expressionism is negotiated through a painterly temperament that marries freewheeling calligraphic energy to a slow, almost reverential modulation of colour and tone. 

There is also a deep love of mathematics and cosmology informing his unique visual lexicon – topographies that might be read equally as infinitesimal and astronomic constantly recur as motifs in the work, and he has often been included in thematic group shows that explore the overlapping intersection of science and art. In this rare interview with FUTURISTIC DRAGON, he discusses finding wonder in everything from a Newtonian equation to a falling leaf, and tells us why he believes play is the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

Where did your desire to create art initially stem from?

That a very big question with a lifetime of answers, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve made art of some kind from as early as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is one of my relatives coming to show my grandmother a carving of a bird they were very proud of. I thought it didn’t look anything like any of the birds I had ever seen, and I immediately ran off into the woods to go and find some wood to carve a better bird.

As a kid in Jamaica, I was always battling with all the artists in the community, as well as all the artists and thinkers in the books at my grandparents’ house, and trying to be better, or as good, as them. From a very young age, I had a fascination with all the geniuses in the world – not just painters, but philosophers and scientists – and the one that fascinated me more than anybody else was Isaac Newton. As a child, I was like a little Newton in my mind, and I was constantly making little experiments.