Statement
1. 1. 2009
Andy Renshaw (B.A. Hons), born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire in 1964.
I started painting under the encouragement of artist Gordon Valentine at the age of 14 and quickly undertook large works in oil. From there I studied painting and printing making at Hull art collage and continued to work as a freelance artist, on leaving collage, for the next decade, developing my own landscape work as well as a large variety of commissions including theatre set work and portrait. In 1993 I made the decision to stop and pursue music. In Feb 2008 I re-engaged with painting. This website is concerned with work undetaken since that date. I currently work in a studio in Herne Bay, Kent.
My interest is primarily in landscape, how we interact with it, its changes and cycles. I work mostly with oil paint and mixed media on brown paper (which is often ripped and over-layered as part of the process). I draw mostly with ink. My paintings concern journeys through and within landscapes.
A landscape is a build up, of over layering, marks, debris, lines and scratches, death and rebirth in its unending cycles.
Memory is the over layering of image, event, language, textures, sounds, shapes. Like the landscape these are all inter-woven into and within its fabric.
For me painting / work is the over layering, scratching back / building up, of paint, paper, ink, colour, marks, and found objects. They are inseparable from memory, landscape, traditional music, a peoples cultural tradition. All involve a fundamental a sense of place, identity and environment.
The marks within the landscape are the history of peoples who have occupied the land. Their lives, politics, wars, civilisations. It is all recorded, documented under and within the layers, the scratches, scores, mounds and ditches. Aerial photography.
Landscape from the air reveals its processes and developments, its human and natural activity. Human endeavour and effect reduced to lines, abstraction and colour. Dark patches in the grass, the under painting.
Painting is history of its own. It buries and reveals its process and development. It has its politics, scratches, scores and mounds, its thoughts / civilisations under the layers. This too is over layering of human endeavour.
So with traditional music, every song and tune holds within it every person that has every played and sung it, contributed to it and passed it on. The singer and player stands at the end of a long line that runs back through time.
Yet all exist only within the one moment, the landscape, the memory, the painting, the song and tune, within this moment that we pass through. The thousand steps of the journey are held within the one we take now. Every journey, no matter how mundane it seems, is a spiritual journey.
In this moment we push through the grass, the reeds and fen, mountains and moor, over the burial mounds, through the landscape, though the memory, the image, through the song.
