Bamboo
L. “Lights”
The critical consensus would probably regard this series of seven paintings at the centre of Andrews’s working life as his greatest monument. (As I write this I can see out of my study window—with eerie synchronicity—a child’s silver helium balloon flying up into the sky over Radnor Walk, SW3.) Anyway, looking at the series together—as one did at last year’s astounding, never-to-be-forgotten Tate Britain retrospective—both cemented its reputation and exposed its weaknesses. Without the overarching concept—the voyage of the ego (the balloon)—to bind the individual canvases together, some of the paintings might seem less significant. That the series ends with Lights VII: A Shadow is its great strength and advantage. A Shadow—the shadow of the balloon on a stretch of sand, with the sea and the horizon and the sky beyond—is one of the great paintings of the twentieth century, and part of its greatness lies in the difficulty of explaining precisely why this should be so. It’s much bigger than you would expect—which was the first shock I received on seeing it. (An aside: what other modern figurative artist has painted such really large paintings throughout his or her career with such consistent aplomb and authority?) A Shadow is as flat as any of the other paintings in the series—acrylic paint, spray gun—but I think its power lies somewhere in the tension between the serenity of the moment—balloon shadow, sand, sea, sky—and the confused tangle of sea-wrack to the left of the balloon shadow. Andrews apparently created this with tape, dipped in black paint, and draped on the canvas. This juxtaposition of the aleatory and the measured, the messy and the serene seems to me the key to this painting’s quiescent and mesmerizing power.
M. Masterpiece
This is a word that should be used with huge discretion and extremely rarely. Vladimir Nabokov was continually outraged by the way American critics would casually bandy about the word “genius”—as if such people were a dime a dozen. The same caution applies to the appellation of “masterpiece.” In fact, only posterity should be the real judge here but Andrews is often described as a painter who “only painted masterpieces,” probably because his output was comparatively small and possibly because so many of his paintings were on a large scale: their ambition and their near-faultless execution tend to stake a big claim—as well as having the side-effect of scaling down the less well-achieved work of other painters. However, it is true that seeing Andrews’s work over the period of his lifetime one is struck by how memorable so many of his paintings are. Or, to put it another way, how few comparative failures there are. Andrews died seven years ago and we have only had one posthumous retrospective but, as one starts ranking the paintings in order of eminence and importance, one realizes just how many exceptional paintings there are in the oeuvre.
N. Narrative
Not so much narrative painting, as we would commonly understand it, but a vague concept of story emerging, tying the individual paintings together, however loosely. Andrews’s practice was to work out a concept or an idea over a series of canvases: the party paintings, “Lights,” “School,” the deerstalking paintings, Ayers Rock, the final Thames paintings. One can’t easily trace the exact connections, but the ghost of a narrative line is teasingly there (from the Colony Room paintings to All Night Long, for example), begging the questions of interrelationships, of sequence, of deciphering. Biographical details help (for example, in the deerstalking sequence, we know that Andrews was not a natural deerstalker—his days out on the hill were fraught) but in the end the links between the paintings remain tenuous. Trying to tell the exact “story” of the progression of “Lights,” for example, is an open invitation to pretentiousness.
O. Odd Ones Out
I don’t like Andrews’s painting Cabin. The perspective of the plane is wrong, yet the perspective of the coastal city below it is perfect. I know there were meant to be faces at the windows, and that he abandoned the idea of placing them there, but any one of the small portrait studies that he prepared for this is better than the finished painting. I also don’t like his landscape Daylesford, a grand house seen in its manicured park (a commission?). It is expertly painted but it seems dead—the oil paint managing somehow to reproduce here the dull flatness of acrylic.
P. Photography
Andrews used photography extensively in his painting, either as a spur to invention or else as a precise model for the finished canvas. The deerstalking pictures, for example, are almost identical to photographs that Andrews had taken of himself and the gamekeeper during the stalk. Working this way from photographs seems to me to be entirely acceptable. To see both the paintings and the photographic originals (as one did at the Tate Britain retrospective) serves only to remind you of the artistic gulf between a photograph and a painting.
Q. Q-tip
Andrews often used Q-tips when painting. To blur? To smear? To lift off? It is a useful symbol of his fastidiousness, it seems to me, a sign of his precision. He also used to bang the canvas: ball up tightly a piece of rag, grip the canvas edge with his left hand and bang the rag-ball firmly on the painted surface, four or five times. This would randomly disperse the paint but it would also drive the pigment deep into the weave of the canvas.
R. Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud appears in the middle of The Deer Park—the title taken from Norman Mailer’s novel. William Feaver has taken a photograph of some bookshelves in Andrews’s studio. They make interesting reading—other people’s books tell you as much about them as do the paintings hanging on their walls. In this selection there is a diverse group of writers: Jung, R. D. Laing, de Sade, William Burroughs, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, lots of Mailer, Paul Scott, Isherwood, Sylvia Plath and other poetry. We know enough about Andrews to see this reading matter as typical of his tastes and interests. But it is the fact that he was an avid reader (by no means true of all painters) that is intriguing—especially to a writer. Rimbaud gave the title to “Lights” (a free translation of Les Illuminations). And Auden is present too in the title of Andrews’s prize-winning painting at the Slade, August for the People (1952). “August for the people and their favourite islands”—to give the line in full. I’ve always thought another line of Auden could serve very well for the “Lights” series: “As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman.” Early Auden was obsessed with the view from above—unemotional, objective, clear-eyed. This is the point of view of the balloonist too: silent, often unnoticed by those on the ground, drifting high above the earth.
S. Silk-screen
The portraits in the three Good and Bad at Games paintings are set against a silk-screened photograph of an office block. Andrews had this done by an industrial silk-screener. There is something about the process of silk-screening that is very typical of the look of an Andrews painting. It seems to me he often strove to paint in a way that made the finished result look silk-screened (the spray gun). And of course he used stencils extensively, particularly in the “School” series. I think he must have used stencils in the deerstalking pictures also. The tiny running deer are so exquisitely done, the outline of their antlers so perfectly set against the misty hills in the background that I feel sure he must have stencilled them on. This doesn’t matter at all, of course. Even in the fish paintings, where the stencil was a way of (a) saving him from having to paint the same fish twenty times and (b) allowing him to achieve the blurry complexities of dark and light pigmentation of fish scales (the pike, for instance), there are examples of precise and beautiful brushwork—stippling, slashing, shading. Look at the foreground grass in the painting Running with the Deer. Can that tough, tussocky, windlashed highland grass ever have been painted better?
T. Thames
Andrews’s last series of paintings, the three Thames paintings, are a fitting conclusion to his life and work. Everything tried before seems to come together here. This is both a real place and a symbol with a great freight of allusion (Sweet Thames, the Styx, the flux of life). The innovation in these canvases is in the use of an almost tidal manipulation of paint and turpentin
e to replicate the daily ebb and flow of the river itself. Andrews would lay his painting flat on the floor, pour on his mix of turps and oil and push the fluid around with the help of a powerful hairdryer. The effect is astonishing. The accumulation of grit (sand and sediment were added to the colour) and the way the mix happened to swirl and settle on the canvas mean that the effect of light on the finished painting, and the viewer’s position, make the pictures endlessly changeable. Both The Thames at Low Tide and Thames Painting: The Estuary are great, dark, brooding, moving paintings—late Beethoven quartet paintings; “Four Last Songs” paintings.
U. Unfinished
Andrews often left his paintings with an unfinished look to them (The Deer Park, for example). But his death in 1995 meant that his last painting in the Thames series, Source of the Thames, was unfinishable. We know from photographs he took how to interpret the possible final form the painting might have taken: a stream flowing out of a dense clump of undergrowth, widening and thickening, the water surface reflecting a blue sky with clouds. But as it stands now it is the most abstract of all his work, and the paint surface is, here and there, clotted with grass stems and seeds gathered from the banks of the river. If the other two paintings are reliable guides, the fluid image would have been fixed somehow with the addition of recognizable branches or leafage. But one sees all the same, in this forcibly arrested work, all the natural atavistic energies of a painter who would later bring his calculating, sophisticated, painterly mind to bear on the subject. He would have given scale—which is lacking at the moment. Look at the figures in The Estuary or In Shade, Foot of Olga Gorge (perhaps my favourite Ayers Rock painting) to get a glimmering of where Source of the Thames might have gone.
V. A View from Uamh Mhor
This huge landscape is another tour de force. Anyone who knows the wilder parts of Scotland will testify to its refulgent veracity. Andrews, reputedly overdosed on the mineral brilliances of Ayers Rock and the palette of rusts, reds, ochres and yellows it compelled, longed for the sopping, airy greenness of remote Perthshire, and this picture is painted with a freedom and brio that are the opposite of the Ayers Rock paintings. Paint dribbles, canvas shows through, the confident rapid passage of the brush is everywhere in evidence. Scotland inspired Andrews—not just in the deerstalking series but also in the bravura oil sketches of the views around Glenartney where he holidayed each summer. His Edinburgh (Old Town) captures that city’s ancient, dour, unique atmosphere with perfect palpability. You can feel the cold scowthering rain coming in off the Firth of Forth.
W. Watercolour
Is it surprising that Michael Andrews was a watercolour painter of the very highest rank? One of the phenomenal bonuses of the Tate Britain show was to see a selection of the small watercolours of a river near Andrews’s house in Norfolk. Technically, they are breathtaking: a painting like Angler: Geldeston makes you marvel about how these effects are achieved. You feel there is something almost magical going on here. Take a box of watercolours: with your paint reproduce the effect of brilliant sunlight glinting on turbid water.
X. The X-shape at the Centre of the Parterre
at Drummond Castle
Seen from the air, “as the hawk sees it.” And in Drummond: the Multicoloured Parterre he leaves the unpainted canvas to mark out the huge Saltire cross of the gravel paths. Is it because it is so precisely formal? Here we see the shaping hand of man working on and controlling nature. The parterre at Drummond is the very antithesis of a phenomenon like Ayers Rock—but perhaps its creation is not so far removed from the process of an artist trying to capture the look and spirit of Ayers Rock by manipulating coloured pigment on a rectangle of canvas. And what do the strange carnival figures marching across the foreground represent? Jolly clowns or anarchic ghouls? Benign jesters or Lords of Misrule?
Y. W. B. Yeats
“Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/His mind moves upon silence.” For some reason, these lines always remind me of Michael Andrews (whom I never met).
Z. Zen
Andrews was very preoccupied with the teachings of Zen—the whole “Lights” series, it can be argued, is analogous to the progress of the soul towards transcendence. And you could further argue that the fastidiousness of Andrews’s eye, his searching for the numinous, transfiguring moment, has a Zen-like quality to it. But this knowledge, though interesting (as interesting as Andrews’s reading, say), doesn’t significantly help one’s response to the paintings, particularly the greatest. (Andrews himself said, “You can’t paint ideas.”) To put it at its most simple—and banal—Andrews was a wonderful, astonishingly gifted painter and a man of intelligence and feeling. He could do anything—oil, acrylic, landscape, portrait, watercolour, vast canvas or tiny sketch—with absolute confidence in the mastery of his powers. This is a blessing to an artist—to know how formidably accomplished you are, and it is very rare. Andrews is without doubt one of the finest virtuoso painters British painting has seen this century—and I believe the claim could be extended back through time without being seriously gainsaid. But what makes him great—and this is what makes all great artists great—is, as Lawrence Gowing noted in 1980, his ability to yoke his prodigious technical capacity to an uncommon imaginative spirit. There is one other necessary factor I would add to the other two, one which is out of anyone’s control—luck. In Michael Andrews all three cohered. His achievement stands there—inspiring, incontrovertible, immutable. In artistic terms a veritable Ayers Rock.
2002
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Photograph
(Introduction to Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from
Unknown Photographers by Robert Flynn Johnson)
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” WALLACE STEVENS
We go to photography for images of reality, but images that are more immediately real than the more contingently intimate, adroit and nuanced versions that other art forms provide. This is both photography’s blessing and its curse: it appears to bear irrefutable witness to the nature and content of our world yet it is achieved mechanically. In theory, anyone with a camera can do it: hence its ambiguously freighted appellation—the “artless art.”
The first photographic image I purchased was in 1967 when I was fifteen. I bought—for £5 (a vast sum to me then)—one sheet from the 1965 Pirelli calendar (the month was November) owned by a boy at my school. It was only the exorbitant price I offered that made him part with it and the picture was pinned for many months on the wall above my desk until it was lost in some end-of-term packing fiasco. Doubtless there was some now-forgotten adolescent sexual fascination that drove my determination to buy this picture but this does not explain why, over the thirty-seven years since I first saw it, I have been able to summon this image to mind effortlessly. A young blonde sunglassed woman, in a white T-shirt embroidered with a small anchor, sits at a cafe table in some seaside location. She has a cigarette in her mouth and is caught by the photographer in the very act of lighting it (from a book of matches), her lips are slightly pursed to hold the cigarette steady, the match is flaring at the cigarette’s tip. I had no idea who this woman was and I had no interest in the name of the photographer. But something about that image made me covet it and urged me to spend so much money to make it mine. Even though I lost it some months later its place is secure in the small but select image-bank in my memory. For the first time in my life a photograph had worked on me. Why? What happens on these occasions? How can a seemingly run-of-the-mill image stir one so?
That photograph was to all intents and purposes anonymous and, the more you come to think about it, in photography anonymity is the norm. When you consider the thousands—perhaps the tens of thousands—of photographic images each one of us encounters in a given year the vast majority—99 percent I would venture—is anonymous. In n
ewspapers, magazines, colour supplements, advertisements, in-store promotions, posters, manuals, part works, CD covers, mailshots, travel brochures, textbooks, knitting catalogues, and so on, the photographer’s byline—if by chance there is one—is irrelevant. When it comes to the way we consume photographs we are like sperm whales, jaws wide, cruising through an ocean of swarming images, unreflectingly scooping up those that our eyes alight on.
The only times we are consciously aware of the authorship of a photograph, I would argue, are when we contemplate the photographs we ourselves have taken (or those of friends and family) or when we go deliberately to the photographer’s monograph or exhibition. The signed image—the appropriated, the owned image—is by far the rarest in this pullulating world of pictures.
Therefore to isolate and pointedly categorize the anonymous, as Anonymous does here, is to postulate something both unusual and intriguing. In our twenty-first-century world of millions upon millions of anonymous images what does the selection of a couple of hundred or so, enshrined in a beautifully produced book, say both about our response to the photograph and the practice of photography and, perhaps more importantly, to its status as an art?
The anonymous photograph, thus selected and presented, makes us ask, with new concentration, what it is about a photograph that elevates it above the casual and banal. What criteria do we bring to our evaluation of a photograph, what makes one memorable, another not? What, in short, makes a photograph good? We have become so accustomed to not seeing photographs, through their omnipresence, that now here is a chance to try and determine (without the bubble reputation) why some images move and enthral and remain in our memories—like paintings, like pieces of music.