Egyptian-born Willing studied at the Slade School of Art, where his arrival coincided with that of William Coldstream as the influential Director and Professor of Painting. Michael Andrews, Paula Rego and Euan Uglow all overlapped as students, and within a few years of graduation, Willing was to have a critically and commercially successful exhibition at Erica Brausen, the gallery which had first shown the work of Bacon. In 1959 he and Rego married, and they lived and worked partly in London, partly in Portugal. In 1966, they decided to live more permanently in Portugal, with Willing taking over the family business on the death of Rego’s father; his time for painting diminished, and it wasn’t until 1974 when they returned to London in the wake of the Portuguese revolution that he was take up painting full-time again. Multiple sclerosis however began to take its toll, and as his physical health faltered he began to work on a smaller, more intimate scale. Willing underwent psychoanalysis, and, combined with medication for his illness, began to suffer from hallucinations and insomnia. He described how when tired, but calm, he would take up paper and charcoal and draw, seeing ‘a scene, brightly lit, clearly defined … like a stage set. This was euphoria … No interpolation was necessary, it had all been done for me – image in both the sense of symbol and form down to the mark’.

Thresholds, British Council 2010