From teenage sweethearts to artist partners

Sculptor Mark Anastasi and his wife Nathalie, a painter, used to share artistic musings when they were just 14. Claire Bonello met the matured artists in their Mosta farmhouse.

by Claire Bonello

The first time I met Mark Anastasi, he was wearing a sarong. I gave an inward snort. In a Beckham-weary world, you want your sculptors to be solid, rough-cut and stone-dusted, not metrosexual skirt-wearers.

Sarongs aside, Mark couldn't be less like Beckham. Highlighted hair, yes - but it's a sunbleached blonde not a carefully applied salon-job. The deep tan he sports is the kind you pick up after long hours at the beach and in the water, not the sun-bed variety. Anastasi is cool but effortlessly so.

You might actually think he's being cocky, especially after reading the blurb on his website (http://www.absolute.com/portfolios/c/coxter) where the blurb "what the artist has to say" reads "I have absolutely nothing to say". And when he says "I don't care what people think of my art... I'm my own critic" it's like Richard England-Love-statue deja-vu.

The artist dictates what's right and fitting to the uneducated masses. But Mark can't be bothered with people's opinions because his starting point is carving statues for his own sake, for the sheer pleasure or relief of creating a unique work of art from an ordinary piece of stone. For a number of years he couldn't bear to part with any of his sculptures. He got over this possessiveness when he realised that his works would remain his own, with the added bonus of being enjoyed by the people who bought them.

Commissions are a headache - he doesn't accept many of them: "I worry I'm not understanding or portraying what the person has in mind." As a veteran of "What the hell is this? It's not what I wanted" scenarios, I'll sit this one out, but I have to admit that I was pleased with the piece Mark came up with. It features his trademark ageless, sexless figure but otherwise it's a faithful portrayal of what I had in mind.

What you don't get to see is what Mark has in mind when carving out his sculptures. Only a few of them are titled. They vary from intricate, labyrinthine diminutive follies to smooth, fluid figures, to gruesome ex-voto throwbacks.

Wine bottles and glasses stand out in weird contrast against a skeletal backbone in the unhelpfully named Ward. In another untitled piece, the same wine bottles form a tableau reminiscent of soothingly dim bars and beer-soaked floors.

The stars of the show have to be Mark's lamps. Light falls in myriad patterns from the hollow honey-combed interiors of these lovely upended cones. Mark isn't into those massive stone lions which are de rigeur for Maltese new-money households. "Monumenti ma naghmilx", he says, meaning he's not going to be coerced into chipping out standard veranda-fare.

But his sculptures aren't all surreal abstracts. I spotted an amazing pair of slim globigerina greyhounds nestling on his studio floor. And then there are Mark's reptiles. Lizard hibernated at Chez Philippe restaurant last winter. It was modelled on one of the many big-time reptiles and iguanas which Mark bred in his workshop.

His reptile stint wasn't some amateurish one-off. Specially designed glass mega-aquariums with climate control housed up to 20 whopper iguanas. On the roof, Mark bred mice to feed to the ravenous reptiles downstairs. This might have made his position as president of the local herpetological society a well-deserved one, but it didn't go down well with his wife, Nathalie.

Tall, blonde ex-model Nathalie is an artist. The hair, the eyes, are all Anita Pallenberg, but unlike Keith Richards's legendary girlfriend, Nathalie can get down and dirty. Tiling, plastering - she does it all. She's been helping Mark in his sort of full-time job of converting houses for a number of years now and Mark says she's as deft a tile-layer as any of them. This is definitely cheering news - I'd rather have Mark and Nathalie laying my tiles than wait for the elusive Il-Mulej or any other tile-layer to appear on the never-never.

The Mark-Nathalie partnership goes back a long way. Nathalie remembers them hooking up when they were just 14. "We were really good friends, we were both artistic and liked doing different things, not what everybody else was doing." By that I presume not just the customary passiggata fuq il-Front topped off with the obligatory Golden Seven Torpedo.

"We'd spend ages just lying around, listening to progressive music, Mike Oldfield... looking at the fish swirling around in our aquaria." These spaced-out sessions later inspired some of Nathalie's paintings where her flamboyantly finned rainbow fish dart about in spectacular deep blue depths. The fish paintings are what she sees - she's been underwater. "It's like a ballet down there - everything's in slow motion. All you can hear is the distant drone of some engine."

The eye of Osiris which graces the Maltese luzzu, the ghajn, is everywhere in Nathalie's paintings. But like Cyclops, her exotic multi-hued painted cats have only one eye. This is done purposely, to create a focal point, to distinguish them from your everyday feline pets and to create a sense of watchfulness. One striking example featuring these ever-seeing eyes depicts life in the village where everybody waits, watches and spies.

In another painting, a baleful overseeing eye symbolises Nathalie's mother looking on at the high jinks that she and her twin sister got up to when she was out. Nathalie's mother was strict, prim and proper while Nathalie was running around an unspoilt Santa Maria Estate in bikini bottoms and Wellington boots catching lizards and snakes.

The affection she feels for the nanny who more or less brought her and her sister up is reflected in the picture Karmni's Kitchen. Complete with galletta plant, cat and home-made gbejniet, it reminds Nathalie of care-free childhood days eating hobz biz-zejt, playing in the rusty bus wreck outside and basking in the warmth of her quasi-adoptive family.

Nathalie's kaleidoscopic paintings and batches of Tunisian tiles offset the cool, shadowy interior of the Mosta farmhouse where she and Mark live with their teenage children Maxine and Nigel. Although Sliema born and bred, Mark prefers the slower, ambling pace of Mosta. The bar next door (is-City) is his living room and he says the people there are more real and down to earth. I don't hold with the generalisation that all non-city folk are salt-of-the-earth, honest Joes without a manipulative thought in their head, but when Mark lugs out my piece, the regulars are all there, ready to give a helping hand, to suss out the work and to direct traffic away from my illegally parked car.