Firstly, a note to the reader. What follows is a collection of bits - observations and ideas, short texts - originally written by Andrew at different times during his life. He gathered them below under a small number of loose descriptive headings. Many are about issues implicit in his creative practice. Others muse on topics, such as cognition and perception, which bear on the general practice of art. Whilst there are evident contradictions at some points, between ideas developed at different times, he chose to let those stand.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler". (quote: Albert Einstein).
New interests seep into my consciousness in an entirely unpredictable and haphazard manner. I cannot will them into being. I am rarely aware of their origin or true cause, nor know the reason they eventually seem irrelevant or depart.
Some ideas arrive years before I exploit them. The prompt for beginning new work, a motivating spark which rekindles my curiosity and excites the desire to make images, could derive from an intense experience - or it may just start from a doodle.
Putting to one side the indirect cultural stimuli - though art, film, literature, and music are very influential indeed - the first impulse for a work is often my inchoate desire to respond to, and devise an analogue for, something I've experienced. That may be something actual, like a place, but it may be intangible, like a remembered feeling. In that very qualified sense, whatever the extent of 'abstraction', I am an artist engaged with the activity of representation.
Ideas take on their definitive form in the course of the making process itself. In the end, it is frequently the case that the initial idea recedes in importance, perhaps even disappears, as the many unforeseen possibilities are noticed and exploited. Choices made in the final stages decide the work's nature and sometimes radically alter it's meaning.
Paintings, once begun, evolve; they seldom tread the beaten path. To some extent they discover their goal as they come into being. As they approach their definitive state, what always comes to matter most is the 'articulacy' of the elements of formal language and value judgements about their 'rightness' in context and in relation to each other.
With me, a sense of the inherent peculiarity of the material world is often not far away. It is a disconcerting quality; the unknown aspect hiding within the commonplace. It is a bit disorienting - like unexpectedly finding oneself lost in a usually familiar place. It can happen as I gaze at the signs of man's industrial endeavours, encounter the beehive structures of cities, or traverse forlorn urban environments. Landscapes and water, natural processes and physical phenomena, biological forms and growth patterns, are especially conducive to this mildly dreamlike state of mind, where the awareness of ones ontological presence and biological condition comes strongly to the fore.
Certain urban, rural or coastal landscapes hold a special emotional resonance. These few localities, to which I feel a particular affinity, have reliably provided me with raw materials for images. They have been - and still are - an imaginative spur.
"Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses". (quote: Seamus Heaney)
From time to time, fairly abrupt changes occur in my paintings with regard to choice of imagery and technical approach; this responds to a recurrent desire to renew my sources of inspiration and formal language, and avoid the pitfalls of self-repetition. My chosen method is to oscillate between the (seemingly) antithetical but (actually) complementary visual strategies of abstraction and figuration; it seems to me natural and inevitable that any period of involvement with either 'tongue' will sooner or later re-awaken a desire for the other.
Yet I can observe that some characteristics and concerns tend to persist; they continually resurface under different guises. As examples of enduring interests and creative working concerns, I note the following:
I take the social value of visual art to be the democratic opportunity it provides to engage in a symbolic dialogue with others. Each artwork - new or old - is a contribution to an endless, world-wide, non-verbal conversation.
It is always tempting to read artworks as, in some way, the representation or embodiment of a state of mind, or state of being. To a limited extent, I can interpret some works of my own in that 'quasi-expressionist' way. But, take note, it does not follow that the state of mind to which the work might seem to allude, or the emotions it induces in the observer, mirror those of the work's author. That is a naive assumption, which overlooks the possibility of a calculated professional detachment in the maker.
Typically, an array of motives - some entirely conscious, others less so - are mobilised in art-making. Prominent among these are enquiry, empathy, exorcism, and play... plus the basic social need - a compelling human instinct - to interact, communicate and connect with other people.
In a sense, when any artist's work is viewed as a whole, it may well constitute a sort of incomplete self-portrait. The image-making process provides a means to recognise and discover, and disclose, some intimate part of my self. This applies as much to my photography as it does to the works in other media. It is always my hope that an observer will find an echo of their own experience in them.
For good or ill, Science has bequeathed to us the technological means to alter profoundly our biology, habitat and material circumstances. In their relentless pursuit of profit and comfort, the populations of the consumer societies show no restraint. They squander natural resources and progressively despoil the natural world. The inconvenient warning signs of global ecological damage, and the misfortunes inflicted on poor third-world societies, are known but ignored.
Our predicament is the undeniable need to reform our lifestyle in ways which will be deeply unpopular and hard to achieve. Put simply, we must possess, waste and consume far less - and build a kinder, wiser and more altruistic society. Thus far, to nobody's great surprise, the omens do not look good.
It is hard to see how artists can play any greater role in resolving such intractable issues than any other professional group; typically, the contribution of visual artists to the moral, intellectual and political zietgeist is oblique, is linked to their personal fame, and disseminates only slowly.
The potential of film media to make a political impact is the major exception; its global popular appeal and narrative nature means the medium is able to examine explicitly political subjects.
"Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system." (quote: Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Where is this place that we, the living, dwell? Artworks frame that existential question, but also (if only temporarily) abate our anxiety by supplying, within themselves, some of the possible answers. That is a part of their appeal, and their practical value; though it is, of course, far from being the sole use or pleasure they offer us.
Art exists to bring us to our senses. Quite literally so; it addresses us primarily through sensual means.
Art helps us become observant of our context and condition; aware of our predicament. It raises our consciousness of the nature and texture of our common daily existence, the universal experience of inhabiting and negotiating the world. It speaks to us of our unarticulated hopes and conflicted desires, our frailty and temporality. It reminds us of the profound pleasures and inevitable pain that accompany the fact of our being alive and sentient, but also mortal.
Artworks, viewed collectively, map for us - and externalise - what we care about and how we feel, as individuals and as a society. They also critique our limitations, directly or obliquely, by hinting at what we could or should feel. From them, we learn to pay closer attention to things on the margins of our conscious experience; to notice the excluded material and under-regarded properties or qualities in our surroundings. They also show us these carry expressive weight or symbolic value.
Our mental picture of the outer world is always a work-in-progress - a provisional construct. Our discontinuous and subjective conception of 'reality' is perpetually at some degree of variance with 'what is out there'. Since our fears and desires largely dictate what we notice or ignore, the situation cannot be otherwise.
Unregarded puzzling events and uncomprehended phenomena surround us in our everyday lives; works of art, and especially contemporary art, often explore, exploit or allude to this intermittently troubling dimension of 'normal' life.
The work of our innate 'coherence-seeking and sense-making' faculties rarely pauses for long; it proceeds even while we are asleep, in dreams. This automatic sub-conscious process is an endless loop of sensation-input, pattern-recognition, risk-assessment, opportunity-analysis and action-proposition. It is an imaginative mental task we must all perform to survive. (Surrealism is a playfull if perverse cultural off-shoot of this same basic activity).
Doubt and faith are sparring partners, inseparably woven into the very fabric of life, and art. Both are omnipresent companions. Each has a vital corrective and balancing role. Doubt is a precondition for attaining knowledge, while faith permits and underpins action. Neither is always reliable or sufficient; either is sometimes friend, sometimes foe.
".... we are nothing but a view of the world...." "Inside and outside are inseparable." (quotes: Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
I am fascinated by the improbability of consciousness. The dialogue between our cognitive processes and the essentially 'alien' character of the 'not-me' world interests me greatly.... the way(s) we receive, select, reject and construe information, in order to locate and orient ourselves within our surroundings.
The optimal balance between insufficiency and redundancy of information (depending on what our mind currently deems the pertinent sense-data) is perpetually lost and re-found, amid our shifting purposes and attention-priorities.
We have to accomodate such divergent (or incompatible) states of consciousness. Intimations of the numinous world - the uber-human realm of 'things-as-they-are' - must be reconciled with our narrower, workaday, purpose-led edition of reality. Our routine mindset is ruthlessly selective. It's reductive data-filters apply the twin criteria of immediate utility and economy of effort. Art restores to consciousness, and makes available for contemplative re-appraisal, the so-called 'useless' information - the aspects of our experience that are flagged as valueless for practical purposes and in consequence dismissed from our attention, and from memory, by the busy mind's normal (over-zealous) data-prioritising processes.
The astonishing beauty, intricacy and variety visible in nature will always be there to nourish and encourage us.
The deeper subject of all art is the condition of being human; it is feed-back on what living in the world entails and feels like for our species.
I'm intrigued by the complex and subtle interplay between our various organs of sense, our perceptual and rationalising processes, our instincts and emotions, and - this not least - by the central sustaining role of memory.
I'm interested in depictive conventions, visual signs and language systems generally - by the ways in which we construct, restructure, encode, interpret and relay information. Also, in the reasons for this, and the consequences.
Entwined with the above, I'm equally concerned with the transmission of content - with the nature of what I might intend or wish to say, and what is then actually conveyed or said in the outcome. There is also the perennial lure of trying again, in vain, to articulate the unsayable.
I delight in the fact that the layered properties of certain specially-endowed images (and/or objects, events, narratives, sounds, etc.) give them the mysterious power to resonate and connect with our psyche in such deeply satisfying ways.
Echoes of those interests can be seen in my work.
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Strictly no reproduction elsewhere without written permission.