Initially what is most striking about the paintings of Tony Bevan is their crusty surfaces and flat, strong colour. Both are the result of his use of raw pigment. His procedures are novel, as he has explained:

in general I start working from drawings which are charcoal on paper. Sometimes I also draw straight on the canvas which I wet so the charcoal soaks into the fibres. I make my own paint using pigment and mediumThe canvas is stretched on the floor and I tend to work from all sides on my hands and knees. When it's put on a stretcher there may be a loss of the full image, but I try and compensate for that when I'm working. But in some cases the cropping can be intentionally quite severe.1

In 1987 the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London staged an exhibition of paintings by Tony Bevan and many of his most important early portraits date from this moment. In Head affinities are clear with the tough portraits of the French writer and artist, Antonin Artaud. A new book on Artaud had been recently published, reviving an interest in the tormented artist whose work Bevan had first seen in 1977. Bevan's marks, as with those to be found in Artaud's drawings oscillate between the controlled and the apparently aggressive, even when the portrait subject is the artist himself.

But Tony Bevan's marks do not simply suggest an attack on the body or the scars or wounds left through assault, but instead are more complex, less overt and have a dual function. On the one hand, they are a mapping of the body whose physicality suggests that the image is a summation of tactile as well as visual stimuli, and, on the other hand, a network of solid marks and lines that assume their own abstract autonomy. The former suggests the legacy of Coldstream and Uglow, the latter the expressive freedom of Auerbach and Kossoff.

As Bevan has explained: 'the marks on the face are a way of showing the structure of the head, the way it's held, its flow patterns. I was interested in exaggerating a line or a mark that already existed. More recently, the lines have gone underneath the skin. They seem to be pressing through the surface.2
. Tony Bevan, interview with JH, February 1993
2. as above