Avalon Art: Retro and Vintage Artwork by Andy Burgess
Avalonart.com is a new venture presenting high quality artwork with a particular preference for vintage and retro imagery. Based on the painting, collage and photography of internationally acclaimed and award-winning artist Andy Burgess, Avalonart.com offers a wide selection of fine art giclee prints, photographs and greeting cards. The company is the brainchild of Burgess’s American based brother Harvey. In a collaboration they formed the company in Tucson, Arizona in March 2008 and shortly after in New York and London.
Avalon Art has recently brought out a range of greeting cards and the Burgess brothers are delighted that they are now on the shelves of some Tucson shops including the one at the Tucson Museum of Art. Moreover, in the near future they will be releasing two new Tucson centric pieces of artwork, one is a collage of Tucson signage and the other, a collage of Tucson car tail lights. |
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Andy Burgess is London based but spends the English winters in Tucson. He has been drawing, painting and photographing the city for over ten years, in a surprising variety of styles and media. Familiar sights, iconic buildings, and famous vistas are reinvented and restyled, sometimes with a comic book enthusiasm and at other times with a more austere abstraction, both striking and enigmatic. With a strong graphic quality, and a dramatic use of colour, Burgess’s paintings evoke familiar scenes with a dream-like intensity.
Travel plays a crucial part in his art. Drawn to the mythic skylines and downtown sprawl of American cities his paintings are representational but not always realistic and certain features of the urban landscape such as the traffic lights, street signs and cars often replace people as the most significant motifs. Once a scene is transformed in paint it may become quite unreal and theatrical but at the same time strongly evoke the actual place to which it refers. His |
paintings of New York have proved particularly popular. We experience New York, familiar from a thousand movies and TV shows, as a mythic and iconic place, and a repository of our dreams and fears.
A trip to Miami’s famous South Beach district resulted in a series of moody paintings of Art Deco hotels, palm trees and vintage American cars. There is a “retro” feel to these paintings. Real places become imaginative settings where colour and light are manipulated to heighten the viewer’s emotional response. The pictures have a cinematic feel that is both stylized and enigmatic. People rarely appear in the paintings, apart from an occasional silhouetted figure. It is as if a human drama has already taken place but the actors have left the set.
An inspirational trip to Cuba also proved fertile territory for Burgess’s painting. In a series of Cuban street scenes he captured the intense sunlight, pastel colours and vibrancy of Havana, Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba. One is struck by the once grand architecture now crumbling to the ground and the feeling of “stepping back in time.” It was this powerful sense of the past captured in the present that was the starting point for these pictures. Perhaps one of his most successful paintings was of a green |
speeding car on The Malecon, the famous coastal avenue emblematic of the city. This painting involved brushing and dragging paint to five the illusion of a car in motion.
Burgess follows in a long line of modern British painters of the city that include David Bomberg, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, but his aesthetic is markedly different, and his choice of subject more eclectic. He has become known for seeking out high vantage points, where, removed from the hustle and bustle, he explores the complex geometry and intersecting planes of the streets and building below. The highlight of his September 2000 Cork Street exhibition entitled “View from the Tower” was a quirky riverside panorama from the top of The Oxo Tower, cheerfully assembling the famous |
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| skyline around St. Paul’s in a patchwork of shape and colour and an impressive panorama of the Boston skyline panning out to the Charles River. A show the following year, entitled “City Heights” also included views from the very top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Empire State Building in New York. |
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Burgess has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, having several one-man shows in London’s West End, and exhibiting international contemporary art fairs in Miami, New York, Chicago, Paris and Madrid. He was a finalist in the prestigious Hunting Art Prize in 2005 and has won several painting awards.
Burgess and his work have been featured in international art magazines such as Modern Painters and Art Review and in the national British press. Writers and journalists alike have also praised Burgess’s paintings. Writing in The Times, John Russell Taylor described Burgess as “an artist with a highly personal take on landscape, painting cityscapes which rearrange perspectives but at the same time clearly respect the spirit of their subject.” The Booker prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, writer of “Remains of the Day,” described Burgess’s paintings as “exuberant and celebratory…quirky and individualistic.” He added, “Andy Burgess is a painter who does adventurous things with one’s view of the world.” The award winning journalist and Broadcaster Jonathan Freedland has also been drawn to Burgess’s work, praising the skill and subtlety of their making and the fact that “Burgess can find mystery where others would pass by.”
In addition to painting Burgess has another passion that also proves artistically fruitful. For many years he has been collecting vintage ephemera, delving into the dusty recesses of thrift stores and charity shops and using his found treasures to produce ‘pop art’ inspired collage.
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“The beauty of collage” says Burgess, “is that it is playful, immediate and inventive.” Collage allows the artist to be experimental and expressive, making tactile intricate work that has a lightness of touch whilst still demanding rigorous compositional skill. After 15 years of making collage Burgess’ mastery of the medium is evident and a solo show is planned for London’s Cork Street in 2009.
Avalonart.com now offers over 100 images of Burgess’ paintings and collage printed on demand to exacting standards and ready for sale in frame shops, art galleries and gift stores.
The company is also keen to collaborate with other publishers and to promote the brand for licensing in both the UK and abroad. Burgess has already been published by the Art Group for Habitat but now Avalonart.com is able to bring his entire body of work to a wider audience. |
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