Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Michael Andrews

An A — Z

A. Ayers Rock

In the biggest of the Ayers Rock paintings, The Cathedral, the North East Face the blue of the sky is so intense that the rock itself appears to stand out against it almost as a trompe l’oeil 3-D effect. It is most disconcerting. This effect is achieved because of the contrast between the sky (painted absolutely flat, the cirrus clouds that speckle it so hazily, filmily rendered that they look miles up) and the shadow-edged fissures and irregularities of the crags and cliff faces. Solidity, mass and eroded frangibility set against infinite depth.

B. Blur

There is an effect of blurriness often present in much of Andrews’s painting. In some Ayers Rock paintings the rock seems almost to swim and deliquesce, to soften into quasi-fleshy contours. One thinks also of the folds of the hills in the background of the deer-stalking series. Perhaps this ability to capture evanescence explains the uncanny ability he has of painting — in whatever medium — that most elusive and shifting of substances, water.

C. Contemporaries

Freud, Auerbach, Bacon, Hockney. Add Michael Andrews to that list (and he has every right to be up there in the pantheon beside them) then post-war British painting begins to seem, as time remorselessly passes, almost a nonpareil. To think of the quality and integrity of the work — of the painting — that this congregation of British artists has produced in the second half of the twentieth century makes one wonder when we will see their like again. All, it’s worth reiterating, are to be found situated here and there within the generous and capacious tradition of figuration.

Funnily enough, one catches glimpses of these and other artists in An-drews’s own work: Freud in Portrait of Tim Behrens; Peter Blake in All Night Long; Euan Uglow in The Family in the Garden; Bacon in the small portrait sketches (Study of a Head with Green Turban, for example); Hockney in the middle panel of Good and Bad at Games.

D. Dogma

At the Slade in the early 1950s Andrews came heavily under the influence of William Coldstream and the almost dogmatic faith Coldstream possessed in “the criterion of figurative quality.” Andrews was, owing to his clear talent, the perfect disciple, but much of his early work, one can now see, is an attempt to escape the anxiety of influence that Coldstream imposed. Hence the deliberate distortions of Four People Sunbathing and the heavy impasto and unfinished look of the Colony Room paintings and sketches. When Andrews found his own style, his abundant graphic gifts returned with fresh confidence. Lawrence Gowing’s introduction to the 1980 Hayward Gallery retrospective is particularly good on the Coldstream effect, as is Colin St John Wilson’s The Artist at Work, a fascinating study of the working methods of both Coldstream and Andrews.

E. Early Work

Andrews was acclaimed as a student. The two paintings August for the People and A Man who Suddenly Fell Over were hailed as evidence of his tremendous promise. I don’t think they really prepare you for the later work (which is another way of saying I don’t like them that much). So which painting marked the turning point? The huge Late Evening on a Summer Day (1957)? Possibly, but it seems unresolved — the parts greater than the whole. I think it must be the equally large (2×3 metres) The Family in the Garden (1960–2), an ostensibly run-of-the-mill subject but on this scale a formidably ambitious undertaking for a young painter. You see here a fusion of the Slade, Coldstream-inspired “criterion of figurative quality” but — because of the size of the canvas — many of the preoccupations of the later work are in evidence: the cohesiveness (or not) of the social group, the precise delineation of atmosphere, the quiddity of the moment. It goes without saying that it is exceptionally well painted, but there’s a compositional audacity that makes the grouping so memorable (the fact that this is the artist’s family is irrelevant: this painting is not fundamentally about portraiture). What is it about the position of the woman’s legs in the centre that is so arresting? Anyone looking at this painting would not be surprised that the same artist could go on to paint “Lights,” “School,” or the Ayers Rock and deerstalking series. In this painting Michael Andrews sets his stall out.

F. Fish

The “School” series. These (and the studies for them) are perhaps the most simply hedonistic of Andrews’s paintings. They are limpid, luminescent works and they show off his skills as a colourist to an almost Hodgkinian degree. There is a level of interpretation that one can impose on them — ideas of social order, of uniformity, of predator and prey — but my feeling is that such an attempt at reading these beautiful paintings is burdensome.

G. Good and Bad at Games

I borrowed this title for the first film I wrote. Which must date my initial acquaintance with Andrews’s work fairly precisely, I suppose. I wrote Good and Bad at Games in 1982. The first big Andrews retrospective had been at the Hayward in 1980, ending early in 1981. I didn’t go to the exhibition but I knew of Andrews’s work — but only the “Lights” series — which takes us back to the 70s. But Good and Bad at Games was when I first made my real connection with the man and the work. I liked the ring of the title and applied it literally to my story of hearty public schoolboys and their brutal persecution of an unsporty junior. Andrews’s “games,” however, are social — to do with the games people play at parties. (My film was shown on Channel 4 in 1983—I wonder if Michael Andrews ever saw it?) The gallery of distorted portraits that make up the painting — people squeezed thin or expanding according to the state of their social confidence — has a loose, coincidental connection with my fictional characters and their respective neuroses or swaggering self-assurance. Andrews was a shy man, by all accounts. Shy people often relish the anonymity that a large and noisy party provides.

H. Heads

Andrews’s small portrait heads — studies for uncompleted pictures — or more formal portraits are exemplary. Some of them look like miniature Bacons. Others (Portrait of June, Portrait of Colin St John Wilson) are as good as Graham Sutherland. You wouldn’t think of Andrews as a portraitist of the first rank: his reputation is to do with large-scale landscapes and series. Yet he is, and the portraits show the complete range of his formidable gifts, the full extent of his prodigious artistic arsenal.

I. Impasto

Andrews associated the use of impasto as an illustration of effort — of a layered, scored and thickly furrowed surface as being somehow an analogue of intensity and concentration. Impasto preserved the record of change in the painted surface. Yet he is criticized as a painter of flat surfaces. Indeed, perhaps this is the most serious criticism levelled at Andrews as a major artist. Namely that his use of the spray gun (the airbrush) and of stencils renders his work lifeless in some way — the surface “dead.” And it’s true, to a certain, minor extent. With some paintings (Lights V: The Pier Pavilion, say) you can have your eye two inches from the canvas surface and discover that the paint is applied as evenly and neutrally as household emulsion. But everything Andrews did with paint is highly deliberate, and the use of the spray gun with its implication of industrial effortlessness was essential for the mood and ambience of certain paintings. The same is true for the argument over acrylic paint versus oil. Acrylic is made for the flat surface. But anyone who thinks Andrews avoided oil paint because it was too difficult to manipulate need only look at his little Scottish oil sketches (Mist Clearing, Glenartney, Glenartney, 19 October ’89, for example) to see his absolute, confident mastery of this medium: oil sketches with all the verve and freshness of a Constable. And later Andrews would use impasto to provide telling contrast: in the huge landscape, A View from Uamh Mhor (1990–91), for example, or the slightly smaller Oare, the Vale of Pewsey (1989–91), Here, in these technically superb oil paintings, the paint is often thinned to near-transparency and the unpainted canvas is allowed to show through. But they also illustrate the way a heavily loaded brush is used to brilliant effect in the details. A smear or thick squiggle of oil and, hey presto, you have a hawthorn hedge or a gorse-filled ravine, or a stream shining silver in a gulley.

J. June

Andrews’s wife, June Keeley, whom he met in 1963. She is present in the first Good and Bad at Games painting — the second ball-like figure on the left. In 1970 their daughter Melanie was born. The postcard reproduction of Andrews’s painting, Melanie and Me Swimming (1978–9), is reputedly the most purchased postcard in Tate Britain.

K. Klee

Paul Klee — not an artist one would instantly associate with Andrews — two different senses of scale, for a start. But they have a lot in common. Both men read widely and thought profoundly about their art, and Klee was an accomplished musician. Andrews was always writing his thoughts down and one wishes he had kept a diary as Klee did. One example. Klee, October 1901: “In the evening there were subdued and serious colour effects of a sombreness and subtlety that one would never believe possible in Italy … There is a moral strength in such colour. I see it just as much as others do. I too shall be able to create it one day. When?” I suspect this was similar to the Ayers Rock effect.

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 turpentine 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