Introduction to my art
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Working in a variety of mediums including pastel, ink, graphite, acrylic, and oil, my paintings and mixed-media drawings explore landscape and the Numinous. My art is situated between the contemporary and the devotional, describing an immediacy of personal experience, and reverence for the Earth's varied forms and places as living presences.
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The mountain, hill, or mound, is the main recurrent motif in my work. Such places have been a source of lifelong fascination to me, both in terms of encounters with awe and wonder, as well as the cultural and spiritual significance that they embody. Featuring in wisdom traditions, myth, and folklore around the world, these most striking of earthly expressions are often considered to be transformative and liminal places, where the natural and ‘supernatural’ meet. Existing at the threshold of the unknown, they are the abode of divine beings, entrances into the otherworld, or intimately connected with the ancestral history of a community. They are often thought to be not only the dwelling places of the sacred, but entities in themselves.
I aim to present something of that liminality by using forms that may feel familiar and relatable as a ‘place’, whilst simultaneously suggesting something more enigmatic and unknowable. The ink and pastel works have a closer relationship to the physicality of landscape, and to both a symbolic and geographic sense of North. Ink is applied in flowing lines or small marks using a dip pen, whilst the pastel is crumbled and smoothed into the paper using my fingers. The tiny marks in ink or graphite build the mountain as if stone by stone. Paintings tend more towards the intangible and mystical aspect, concerned with making visible an ‘inner’ light, rather than capturing the natural light of place. I often paint gesturally into a wet glaze, or work in small triangles to build up an image that glows from within.
In repeatedly creating these forms I am expressing something of my felt sense about certain familiar terrestrial landscapes, but it is never an attempt to depict them as they appear. Additionally I am using these kinds of landscape forms in an associative way, as a visual language through which to explore and describe aspects of mystical or esoteric experience and thought. In this sense my work is as much about giving form to the formless, and connects to the idea or belief in immanence, that all material form (including the Earth) is an expression of divine presence.
Many of the artists whose work inspires or informs my own also explore this relationship between the spiritual and nature/landscape, or the immaterial and physical form. Contemporary examples include Italian painter Agostino Arrivabene, the music and poetry of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, and the varied work of Anselm Keifer. Other influential artists in this thematic area from past eras would be Cecil Collins, Samuel Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, and Nicholas Roerich. In terms of those who focus more exclusively on landscape and perhaps its emotional resonance or formal qualities, I admire the likes of Joan Eardley, Ivon Hitchens, Norman Ackroyd, and Pedr Balke. Work by numerous writers, poets, thinkers, researchers, magicians or mystics also provide vital inspiration. Peter Kingsley, Carl Jung, John Moriarty, Don Domanski, to name but a few, as well as many more 'occult' influences. Certain aspects of a current resurgence in interest for the ancient landscapes of Britain, its folkloric customs and magic, are also in tune with my own sense of these isles, and my love of walking through it.
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"By looking beyond the reductionism of 'just materiality', we can begin to understand something of the earth's desires as it communicates to us through the landscapes it has devised to speak its language."
"That Nature has devised a way to offer these signs and open these channels should be no surprise, for it has also fine-tuned the equipment required to perceive them."
P.Prudence - Figured Stones, Exploring the lithic imaginary, p120, p149
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"The light of nature, the lumen naturae, is a light with a fiery longing to enkindle."
"It is an "invisible" light: Now it follows that in the invisible alone hath man his wisdom, his art, from the light of nature. Man is a “prophet of the natural light”.
C.G.Jung - Collected Works 8 p391
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Biography
Andrew (b.1985) is from Worthing on the coast of West Sussex, between the English Channel and the South Downs. Among the landscapes of his home are the hills of Cissbury and Chanctonbury, both of which have significant histories of human encounter; neolithic flint mines, iron age forts, and rich associations to myth and magic continuing into the present day. From an early age, walking into, and forming a relationship with this land of chalk and flint has provided deep inspiration.
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Andrew first began to make landscape images whilst studying Ba(Hons) Fine Art: Contemporary Media at the University of South Wales in Caerleon (2005 - 2008), which is itself a location with significant historical and mythical layers. A key experience that influenced the development of his work came when walking the industrialised landscapes of the valley’s, noticing how some spoil heaps from the mining industry — the scars of a wounded land — were becoming parts of the landscape in their own right, with plant and animal life beginning to return. These observations informed a core element in Andrew’s work that is about holding experiences of awe and wonder in Nature, together with the felt sense of what has been lost. His degree dissertation was titled 'Beginning With The Wound: Shamanism in Contemporary Art'.
After graduating with first class honours, Andrew began to work in the field of mental health and social care. To bring together and deepen evolving interest in the expression of psyche and soul within art, Andrew undertook the MA Art Psychotherapy training at Goldsmiths College, London (2010 - 2013). In 2015 Andrew moved to Edinburgh, acting upon a long held desire to live in closer proximity to the mountainous North, and the five years during which he lived in Scotland were formative for his art. During this time he exhibited his work regularly, often with Visual Arts Scotland, and The Society of Scottish Artists, of which he became an elected Professional Member in 2019.
In 2020 Andrew returned to Newport in south east Wales, where he now works in private practice as an Art Psychotherapist, and offers Creative Mentoring in addition to his art making.
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