Interview
AlsoHere is a recent interview by Cass Art following The Cambridge Invitational 2021.
Can you tell us where your passion for art stemmed from and your journey at the start of your career?
I think my passion for art stemmed from watching my brother Glenn when I was little. He was 8 years older than me and forever drawing comics at the table, full of creative ideas. It was very normal in our house to be drawing or painting using rotoring or dip pens and colouring-in with biros or felt tips, and bottles of Winsor and Newton coloured inks were often given at christmas. I saw some in their packaging the other day, just the same, and the illustrations on their boxes really sent me back to how it felt getting a brand new colour bottle and adding it to the collection.
Throughout schooI I made badges, T-shirts, posters, comics, painted theatre sets, put logos on the back of leather jackets, made covers for bootleg tapes, forged tickets to the disco(!) and I liked being good at it. I also wanted to do as well as I possibly could as I progressed and always believed I would get, and deserved, an ‘A’ through O’ and A’ levels. I was amazed when I got to Art College (Fine Art, Manchester 87-91) how few of the students had got A’s (so many had Es or failed), but then I learnt that it wasn’t all about having technical ability, that there was so much more to painting and drawing than making something look exactly like it does in real life. That took me some time to adjust to.
It was then that I started to look more and more at other artists (Sickert, then Matisse, Bonard, Vuillard), learning about them and often copying their work in my sketchbook just to tune into their vision. It was a good learning curve for me, for while many or my contemporaries were inclined, or pushed toward, abstraction, I was reassured that there was a place for good figurative art.
Are there any specific influences on your work?
As far as painters go the ones I always return to are Hopper, Vuillard and Bonnard. Bonnard is just magic, his compositions and colour are so exciting and I return again and again and see new things. Vuillard offers something similar but more sedate, and I look at his work a lot. I also have a book about Hopper that I got on my 19th birthday that I still look at today. The pages are curled, things have been cut out, annotations, tea-stains. I re-read his biography often and as I get older I think I get the pictures more and more. Not just his famous paintings but his plein-air watercolours are beautiful. Recently, Sickert and the Camden group have raised their heads again. Also Matisse.
Can you tell us how you feel your art has evolved from your early work and what’s in store for the future.
Well after art college I didn’t paint or draw for over 20 years, but when I returned in 2013 I started out doing large scale portraits (from my own photos) in charcoal. Having missed so many years I wanted to make an impression with scale and technical ability, however more recently I enjoy my sketchbook work from life as they have more honesty about them and are much harder to do well. It’s a bit like alchemy in that if I stick at it I might produce one in twenty that I really like that wouldn’t be good without the other nineteen. I guess I feel less need to show off and am maybe thinking about what really represents me and the world I inhabit with my family in Cambridge. As for concrete plans, I do make them but have found that if I tell anyone about them they never seem to come off – like some kind of black magic – so I do my best to just get on and see what happens and keep schtum!
What medium do you prefer to work in Andy and are there any specific Cass products that you use.
For large-scale drawings I used Derwent charcoal pencils. I like to keep my pencils sharp so I get through loads of them, using ‘light’ for most of the work, then adding darker areas in ‘medium’ and ‘dark’ after fixing. I also use charcoal dust applied with cotton wool or tortillons, but I make that myself by crushing charcoal sticks into dust.
As for painting I usually paint oil on canvas on board, and really seem to mix up my product. But what I do use, and this has been something of a revelation, and that is Zest-It, the no-odour paint thinner. Previously white spirit in a warm studio was sending me a little odd, so I'm really glad to have discovered something that doesn't make my head spin after a day indoors!
Can you tell us where your passion for art stemmed from and your journey at the start of your career?
I think my passion for art stemmed from watching my brother Glenn when I was little. He was 8 years older than me and forever drawing comics at the table, full of creative ideas. It was very normal in our house to be drawing or painting using rotoring or dip pens and colouring-in with biros or felt tips, and bottles of Winsor and Newton coloured inks were often given at christmas. I saw some in their packaging the other day, just the same, and the illustrations on their boxes really sent me back to how it felt getting a brand new colour bottle and adding it to the collection.
Throughout schooI I made badges, T-shirts, posters, comics, painted theatre sets, put logos on the back of leather jackets, made covers for bootleg tapes, forged tickets to the disco(!) and I liked being good at it. I also wanted to do as well as I possibly could as I progressed and always believed I would get, and deserved, an ‘A’ through O’ and A’ levels. I was amazed when I got to Art College (Fine Art, Manchester 87-91) how few of the students had got A’s (so many had Es or failed), but then I learnt that it wasn’t all about having technical ability, that there was so much more to painting and drawing than making something look exactly like it does in real life. That took me some time to adjust to.
It was then that I started to look more and more at other artists (Sickert, then Matisse, Bonard, Vuillard), learning about them and often copying their work in my sketchbook just to tune into their vision. It was a good learning curve for me, for while many or my contemporaries were inclined, or pushed toward, abstraction, I was reassured that there was a place for good figurative art.
Are there any specific influences on your work?
As far as painters go the ones I always return to are Hopper, Vuillard and Bonnard. Bonnard is just magic, his compositions and colour are so exciting and I return again and again and see new things. Vuillard offers something similar but more sedate, and I look at his work a lot. I also have a book about Hopper that I got on my 19th birthday that I still look at today. The pages are curled, things have been cut out, annotations, tea-stains. I re-read his biography often and as I get older I think I get the pictures more and more. Not just his famous paintings but his plein-air watercolours are beautiful. Recently, Sickert and the Camden group have raised their heads again. Also Matisse.
Can you tell us how you feel your art has evolved from your early work and what’s in store for the future.
Well after art college I didn’t paint or draw for over 20 years, but when I returned in 2013 I started out doing large scale portraits (from my own photos) in charcoal. Having missed so many years I wanted to make an impression with scale and technical ability, however more recently I enjoy my sketchbook work from life as they have more honesty about them and are much harder to do well. It’s a bit like alchemy in that if I stick at it I might produce one in twenty that I really like that wouldn’t be good without the other nineteen. I guess I feel less need to show off and am maybe thinking about what really represents me and the world I inhabit with my family in Cambridge. As for concrete plans, I do make them but have found that if I tell anyone about them they never seem to come off – like some kind of black magic – so I do my best to just get on and see what happens and keep schtum!
What medium do you prefer to work in Andy and are there any specific Cass products that you use.
For large-scale drawings I used Derwent charcoal pencils. I like to keep my pencils sharp so I get through loads of them, using ‘light’ for most of the work, then adding darker areas in ‘medium’ and ‘dark’ after fixing. I also use charcoal dust applied with cotton wool or tortillons, but I make that myself by crushing charcoal sticks into dust.
As for painting I usually paint oil on canvas on board, and really seem to mix up my product. But what I do use, and this has been something of a revelation, and that is Zest-It, the no-odour paint thinner. Previously white spirit in a warm studio was sending me a little odd, so I'm really glad to have discovered something that doesn't make my head spin after a day indoors!
