Andy Burgess: Why I Paint

Why do I paint the subjects that I paint? Buildings and cars?

This is difficult to explain... I have to go back to my earliest interests...

All painting is about colour, shape and design... and the pleasure in paint as a substance to be manipulated.

I started out painting abstract pictures... not overly conceptual but interested in the illusion of space... all painting is an illusion of the three dimensional world (criticism of conceptual art is silly – all art is conceptual... there has to be an idea!)

I painted blocks and rectangles and grids... interested in the tiny fragments of colour showing through...

Composition, harmony and disharmony (this has an equivalent in music) and also mark-making, which is one of the great pleasures of painting – fast slow, accidental, calligraphic...

Eventually I painted myself into a corner - and so I looked out of the window and painted the rooftops from my studio. Then I went to New York and painted rooftops from up high: the canyons below... geometry and space. America was perfect for this - the conjunction of different architectural styles.

Eventually I had to come down to earth - street fronts, awnings, shops, and the iconography of the street. For the first time there was a little bit more of a conscious narrative... a different tradition... the Impressionists painting the city and also Pop Art... comics, cartoons, text... stimulated my interest in graphic art; the visual poetry that we see around us every day...

Also the city provides an endless narrative... the sense of place and how evocative that is in ones memory... light and shadow, the hubbub of the city, loneliness and a cinematic representation of these ideas.

I’ve since developed other passions/hobbies and obsessive occupations such as documenting old shop signs and lettering, and painting reflections in windows (a favourite of painters), graffiti and doorbells.

I realised that I like the old fabric surviving in the modern world... eg. Painted signs etc so there is an element of nostalgia... but not kitsch I hope. For Vettriano and others... it is a fictionalised world, 1930’s dresses, waiters, men in tails, dancing on a beach... it’s a conceit to manipulate the viewer, sentimental and corny and nothing to do with the present. I paint what still exists, what’s real... the art deco hotels are still there... there is a modern car in the Marlin painting.

Cuba was perfect for me... all the elements... crumbling buildings, texture... old cars... intense light... pastel colours... but it exists in the here and now.

And I’m still passionate about what you can do in painting that you cant do in any other medium... painting light and atmosphere... the alchemy of paint that makes you believe you are looking at glass or metal or pavement or palm trees... an illusion!

Stillness and silence... two of my favourite painters are Vermeer and Chardin... quiet, still, exquisite attention to surface... a magical and sublime rendering of space between you and the picture.

And there are other painters I love and aspire to... Matisse and Cezanne... decoration and design, luxury, organic drawing, building shapes, simplifying the world so that less is more.

Yes, I use photographs, but I don’t want people to say "it’s so real it’s like a photo". I edit, crop, manipulate colour, reduce the palate, change the scale, add things, subtract things, merge and composite photos... but in the end painting can do so much more...