Festival exhibitions 1
Michael Andrews: Ayers Rock and Other Landscapes (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, till 29 September)
Flight in the heather
Richard Calvocoressi
However inadequate, the term 'School of London' has been in use in artistic cir- cles for over a decade now, to denote an informal and in certain respects private alliance of painters whose often unfashion- able adherence to the human image since the 1950s has attained something of the intensity of a religious faith. That it is a question more of a common attitude of mind than a stylistic tendency or pro- gramme may be judged by the fact that the five artists who form the nucleus of this `movement' — Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach — make work that on the face of it looks surprisingly dissimilar.
Of the five, Michael Andrews is in many ways the odd one out. He has been described as 'elusive' and 'the most retiring of a reclusive group'. A tall, slim figure in his early sixties, his sharp, bespectacled fea- tures and nervous movements reflect an equally agile mind. He is scrupulous in his use of words and is continually measuring and comparing passages of time — record- ing on the back of his studio door, for example, the number of months he spent cycling, the precise date he first stalked deer or the differences in age between him- self and his friends Freud and Bacon. This obsessional side is offset by frequent flash- es of humour and the occasional hilarious imitation of one of his friends.
Fifteen years ago Andrews left the intro- verted London art world to live in the countryside near Norwich, where he was born. For the last two decades he has been painting mainly landscapes. There are few portraits in his work and even fewer self- portraits; in the most famous of these, the touching picture of the artist teaching his daughter to swim (in the Tate Gallery), he portrays himself as if seen obliquely by another person. The painting was in fact based on a photograph: Andrews uses pho- tographs, neither ironically as in Pop art, nor slavishly as in Photorealism, but simply as an aid to memory. He works slowly, pro- ducing one or two major paintings a year, the result of a close identification with his subject over a long period. So concentrated is the experience of empathy that Andrews not only loses himself in the object of per- ception but resists temptation to leave much of a personal imprint on the canvas. Through a variety of imperceptible tech- niques, some controlled, others freer and more open to chance, thin, dry paint is made to approximate the surface texture of the thing observed; or to suggest the less tangible atmosphere or 'feel' of a place. Andrews's art is sometimes considered to be the most naturalistic of the School of London painters but beneath its apparent objectivity lies an infinitely subtle readjust- ment of reality to confirm to the artist's imaginative vision. Nowhere is this process more remarkable than in the succession of Scottish landscapes which he began some 15 years ago, the majority of which are con- cerned with stalking in all its aspects — physical, psychological, topographical. Andrews has subjected himself to the gru- elling but exhilarating experience of stalk- ing every year since 1976 (with the exception of 1983, when he travelled to Ayers Rock in Australia).
What is immediately striking about the stalking pictures is, first of all, their evoca- tion of space: the biggest relate closely to the scale of the human body and, when hung at the correct height, give one the illusion of standing a short distance behind the sprawled figures on the ground. Sec- ondly, they capture the sweeping physical grandeur of the Scottish landscape, a land- scape shorn of everything that might detract from the marksman's (and artist's) aim — 'nature sighted down the barrel of a gun', in Jonathan Raban's memorable phrase. Finally, there is an almost classical stillness about these pictures, a sense of breath held.
For his latest landscape, a view of the Highland estate which he has come to know intimately, Andrews acquired a high- powered telescope to help him define with accuracy the contours of every hill and beat. Like the best artists, he processes information carefully, foreshortening and distorting in his attempt to compress the three-dimensional world on to a flat sur- face. In A View from Uamh Mhor (more thickly painted than previous works because Andrews has returned to using oils), one has the powerful sensation of looking down on to an expanse of country- side. For the artist, the landscape is reso- nant not simply with personal meaning. Although empty of people, it has to a cer- tain extent been shaped by man over the centuries or at some point has captured his imagination. Andrews was intrigued to dis- cover that Uahm Mhor features in Kid- napped as a place of rest and recuperation for David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart on their arduous 'Flight in the Heather'. He has recently begun an ambitious paint- ing of Edinburgh, inspired in part by read- ing Heart of Midlothian with its vivid descriptions of public hangings and mob violence.
Andrews's conception of a synoptic 'his- torical landscape' probably has closer affinities with John Buchan than with either Stevenson or Scott. 'Being equally sensitive to the spells of time and of space,' Buchan wrote in his autobiography, 'to a tract of years and a tract of landscape, I tried to discover the historical moment which best interpreted the ethos of a par- ticular countryside, and to devise the appropriate legend.' Not only is Buchan a very visual writer, brilliant at mapping the Scottish landscape; he was also a traveller and a man of action who pushed himself at times to extremes of physical endurance. Michael Andrews, unlike his predominant- ly studio-bound colleagues in the School of London, looks for his motifs in similar areas of human experience.
Richard Calvocoressi is Keeper of the Scot- tish National Gallery of Modern Art.
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