Iain Andrews
Iain Andrews is an artist who works in painting and drawing, based in Manchester, UK. His early interest in art and was fostered by his father bringing home rolls of paper whilst working as a draughtsman at BT. Following a foundation course in his home town of Walsall, he studied a MA in painting at UCW, Aberystwyth, which allowed him the time and space he needed to develop a vision as a painter, away from the bustle and commotion of London. His early work took as it’s subject matter biblical narratives, culminating in a series of large paintings based on the Crucifixion, which are now housed in St Paul’s, Walsall. Upon leaving Wales, he trained as an art psychotherapist, partly as a result of an encounter with Ken Kiff’s paintings and writing on the utility of art. Andrews now combines making paintings with working with teenagers struggling with a range of mental distress, using image making as a way of understanding and processing psychological material. This work has fed into the subject matter of his current paintings, which are concerned with how stories are retold and reimagined, particularly folk and faery tales. Andrews has gained recognition for his colourful and dreamlike works, appearing on BBC 2’s School of Saatchi, several times in the Jerwood drawing prize, and winning awards in Marmite Painting Prize, Jackson’s Painting Prize and the National Art Open. He has recently exhibited as far afield as Beijing and Alaska, and is a member of Contemporary British Painting.
Could you tell us more about your background and how you began creating art?
Following my MA in painting from University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, I completed a Postgraduate diploma in Art Psychotherapy at Sheffield and I currently work with teenagers struggling with a range of psychological distress in Moss Side, Manchester, alongside practicing as a painter. Making art has always been the primary way that I have made sense of the world as I grew up as an only child and as such spent a lot of time living inside my imagination, inventing worlds that were then drawn, painted and made into models. As such my experience of the world was, and still is primarily imaginative and visual rather then verbal. Working with young people whose imaginative experience of the world can have catastrophic consequences, such as in the case of eating disorders and self harm, means that the creation of art functions as a vehicle to communicate that which cannot be spoken about.
What does your art aim to say to its viewers?
I don't really think too much about what I want the viewer to take from my work, since I don't want to make work that is polemic or has a particular agenda, but is more of a kind of Rorschach test that requires the viewer to do some work in reading it. I am interested in how stories are retold and reimagined, and as such there can be a sense of nostalgia or familiarity in my work, linking it to a past image or memory of an image. The idea of how the past influences the present is obviously something that I'm interested in as a psychotherapist, but also as a a painter. There's a sense in which I'm always trying to return to something, to visually recover something lost.
Can you tell us about the process of creating your work? What is your daily routine when working?
My paintings often begin with a collage, which takes the place of an initial sketch for me. Following this collage, i usually work in acrylics, using paint that is intentionally liquid and fluid, loosely working from the collaged image to build up a number of layers, that are then sanded and scraped down before being reapplied. I tend to think about the process as the opposite to archaeology, where layers are scraped away in order to reveal an object. Instead in painting, the application of layers functions as a means to imbue the image with some kind of authenticity, When something begins to appear, it is often adjusted with figurative elements such as shadows and highlights being added, and then, hopefully something about the object takes on a life of it's own. I tend to work in the afternoons and evenings, most days but never on a Sunday. I'll usually have 2 or 3 works on the go at the same time, but I'll often return to works months after I thought them 'finished', scraping down areas and repainting them. If work sells quickly, I'm denied this opportunity, which is very much a mixed blessing.
What is the essential element in your art?
I think some kind of paradox is essential for me as a painter. I use large brushes and gestural marks, but work relatively small, I'll make an instinctive, spontaneous brushstroke then spend hours adjusting it with tiny brushes, I work from past stories and traditions but want to make work that is new and current, I'll use methods that are up to date such as photoshop to create a collage, but then render this in oil paint. There has to be some kind of resistance when you make work, a tension within which to operate.
In your opinion, what role does the artist have in society?
I think the artist functions a bit like the fool in Shakespeare's plays. The role of the fool is to reveal some kind of truth, one which rational, verbal, logical reason cannot access. Why a particular image draws us back to it again and again is difficult to say, but precisely for this reason the artist gains a degree of protection from a world that is full of endless discourse and chatter. Art causes the viewer to pause for a moment and take time to look, to listen slowly to the world around them, and in a world, as T.S Eliot said that ' brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness ; knowledge of speech but not of silence ; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word' , we need art to help us move slowly.
