Andrew works with metaphor, symbolism and allegory. He draws a lot of his concepts from historical painting combined with its own experiences, as he adds invented myths and narratives to his images. Each painting is individualistic and seeks to communicate a message about its subject to the viewer. His practice plays with the traditional norms of landscape and figurative painting and uses it as a vessel to convey ideas and thoughts, both from direct observation and his own interpretation. Andrew wants to use his paintings in a conceptually abstract and philosophical way, to communicate different ideas through experimentation with composition and the subversion of expectations.
His paintings have a direct and engaging concept yet paradoxically try to balance this with ambiguity and unease in order to allow the viewer to bring their own experience to the work. His intention is that in the audience’s search for meaning in the picture they will open doors into their own internal thoughts and personal visual library, this in turn, may provide some emotional experience for them as a result of seeing the work.
Andrew always looks to achieve a harmony between colour, composition and concept. Going so far as to making the shape and dimensions of the painting match its particular concept. Instead of throwing ideas together, his paintings use every part and detail of the image to relate and amplify the cryptic message or allegory he is communicating. In the early stages of a painting’s development this means allowing certain symbols and metaphors associated with the central idea to be discovered and harmonised as the painting develops.
Much of Andrew’s work is intended to be allegorical, as he creates scenarios and imagined landscapes that interact with each other, expressing an alternate narrative disguised within a set of imagined rules and aesthetic pictorial judgements. He observes very few physical objects or spaces to create his paintings but appropriates digital reproductions of historic painting and images offered by film and literature. His painting process both reflects and utilizes the media saturated world we live in today to make handmade, concentrated images that are ironically the material antithesis of the media that informed them.
Andrew’s studio practice consists of using traditional academic oil painting methods with respected but also subverting and playing with them. Prioritising the harmony of the composition and colour with the associated themes and message of the painting. Andrew is very interested in the materiality of paint through its application to the surface and its fluidity, experimenting with various textures, layers and glazes as appropriate to achieve the maximum effects. His technique requires strong under drawing, the use of glazes, scumbles and altering fluidity through thick and thin layers as appropriate. Andrew is well versed in historic painting techniques and sees his own method as an appropriation of academic painting mixed with various other influences in brushwork and colour from both contemporary and historic painters.
