India: Andrew Gifford

Collectively, the India paintings provide a superb account of the way Andrew Gifford approaches landscape painting and how he succeeds in keeping an enduring tradition relevant, fresh and modern. Painting in a digitally-connected world, the exhibition catalogue tries to bring together Gifford’s own accounts and images of the people he met and who helped him, but no doubt there are hundreds more strands of photos and stories archived on phone memories across the sub-continent. Those accounts are out there, but in the meantime we have crammed into the catalogue as much as we can to get the flavour of the journey, with only a passing nod to a timeframe (April, May and December). Otherwise think only of Pryanka, Preeti, Farhan, Mono and John Milton, the taxi driver Andrew met in Pondicherry:

"I guess he was named after the English poet although he spoke very little English. One of my favourite quotes is from Paradise Lost .. .”The mind is its own place, and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” . wise words applicable to much of life.. particularly if you’re living somewhere like Kolkata. I liked this John Milton too, except when he nearly killed us both 80 times on the long road to Pondicherry (his blind corner overtaking manoeuvres were straight from the ‘quick steps to death’ manual)...and I’ll never forget on that dark journey through the twilight palms and marshland of southern India asking, “John Milton can we stop for a pee”. "