- Past Exhibitions
- Biographical Information
Andrew Gifford - Leeds/Bradford Paintings
4 June - 8 June 2003The work in this exhibition is divided into two distinct parts. Firstly, a group of paintings started in the streets of Bradford and Leeds over a three-month period last winter. These were then reworked at the artist's studio in France and finally completed by late April this year. The second group developed out of a small number of sunsets and evening studies begun whilst the Bradford/Leeds paintings were being finished. They were painted in the fields around his home in South-West France and owe much to the continuous run of clear skies and the extraordinary weather of an early spring.
Born in Sheffield and brought up in Middlesbrough, Andrew has always felt a need to paint the cities and industrial landscapes of the North of England and had long planned to paint Bradford. He loved the blue-grey tones of the winter light and the sharp contrast with the neon signs of the curry houses along the Great Horton Road. When he arrived there two years later, he routinely drove around the city searching for subjects, then set up his easel on a pavement or the central reservation of a road and begin each picture, covering the board rapidly. Though his paintings usually take several months to complete, he initially paints with great confidence and at speed. It is a fascinating process to watch and in a few minutes his conspicuous position would often attract a small crowd of passers-by watching the painting progress and giving advice. Occasionally a restaurant-owner would send a child out with some onion bahjees or a cup of tea and once, the driver of a customised Subaru pulled up beside Gifford - the car's thumping bass-speakers nearly shaking the painting off the easel - to tell him "what a Bad-Boy painting" he was doing.
In early December I visited him in Leeds. At this point all the Bradford/Leeds paintings were under way and though several of the larger paintings had only been worked on for a few hours, all the details of the finished subjects were already present. At that stage one would probably describe them as exquisite plein-air oil sketches, but paintings that not yet offered the depth of colour and subtleties of light that were to develop in the following months. Soon afterwards he took all the paintings back to France and until the end of May he completed the series in his studio, adding layer upon layer of translucent paint. In working on the series at a distance, Gifford's painting seems to go far beyond the need for any visual aids. He keeps no sketch-books or written notes and even if he possessed a camera, film would be entirely ineffective at registering the subtleties of a grey, winter half-light or the glow of neon lights at dusk. He relies solely on a staggering visual memory and a deep understanding of the logic of light itself.
By early March Andrew was also underway on what was to become The Fontaine Evening Paintings. These required a very different way of working. All the paintings in the series attempt to convey the precise light that is present for five or, perhaps, ten minutes at most. Setting out to paint the sun low down in the horizon, he realised that the light changes so quickly that to have any success he would have to begin the painting well ahead of the sunset and anticipate the position and colour of the sun at a particular moment. That usually allowed him about five minutes either side of the actual sunset to work on the precise colour of the sun as well as the effect the light was having upon the sky and the shadows in the fields. Those ten minutes required complete concentration as well as extreme physical and mental dexterity. He soonfound the process so draining that he had to stop himself doing any painting in the hours leading up to the start of one of the sunsets.
The next day he would complete the painting from memory and then, as with the Bradford/Leeds series, over the next few weeks build up numerous layers of paint. Seen together, the speed and delicacy of these studies make a comparison with Constable's cloud sketches inescapable. Gifford's apparent spontaneity has led to a beautiful and deeply seductive group of paintings, yet like Constable, one never suspects the artist has set out to produce anything other than working investigations into nature. They are all part of a process that ultimately led to a pair of much larger canvases (Fontaine Evening Painting XV and XVI) and it is with these that he brings the Fontaine Evening Paintings to a conclusion. Using the same observations of colour and light that he recorded in his studies, Gifford was now working on such a large scale that he could precisely describe the intricate relationship between the dying sunlight and the colours of the fields, clouds and the expansive vaulting of the sky.
He was working on one of these paintings when I went to see him in March. As he painted he talked of the mechanics of light: that what is seen as sky is really no more than the refraction of sunlight off ozone. That the sky appears darker the higher you look simply because less ozone is present and less light is refracted. Similarly, as there is more ozone at your feet, one might expect to see more refraction of light at eye level. And this is precisely what appears in his painting: it is low down, in the space between horizon and eye that we get all the fireworks of light. The incredible drama of a spring evening plays out in front of us: he describes the distortions created by our eyes as they struggle to compensate between the extremes of bright sunlight and deep shadow, creating prisms of orange light floating in pools above the ground.
The understanding of light is central to Gifford's art. Only a painter could record how we comprehend the volume of a sky, or the colours of a nocturnal landscape whilst simultaneously being dazzled by a setting sun or a neon street sign. These are aspects of our perception that the human eye alone can comprehend; something that goes far beyond the limits of any camera. One hundred and fifty years into the photographic age it is exciting to discover that there are still aspects of reality that only an artist can record.
John Martin
May 03