The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
"It is ... important to me that my work is evocative. "1
evoke--call up (spirit from the dead, response, feeling,
memories, energies) so evocation evocative evocatory
evolute 1- (Math) locus of centres of curvature of
another curve that is its involute
evolute 2--Develop by evolution
evolution ... 2
Garry Andrews' painting is produced in the nebulous space between evocation and evolution. Drawn and Courted is representative of four years of his work-the evolution of an artistic vocabulary.
The works, large acrylic canvasses and pastel drawings, are thoroughly modernist-evoking and evolving their linear historical source (mainly) in the 1950s (Pollock et al) when the energy of modernism perhaps peaked equally high as at its inception in fin de siecle France. Painterly Abstraction, in its confounding of the personal and universal, of form and content, continues to attract and define the artist and audience of today. It is a trope based upon mystification, invested in the aura of the art object and the contemplative, anonymous space of the gallery.
evolution: The works' success lies in Andrews' evolution of a 'personal' iconography. This is quite a conscious, formalist process. Chosen key symbols ("masks, hearts, moons, terrestrial landforms such as rocks, tree trunks or abstract figures derived from such forms") recur, imbuing them with an iconic status and generating a self-reflexivity within the oeuvre. The artist is individualised, as the works, turning in upon themselves, create a realm of subjectivity.
evocation: The symbols themselves, however, are intended to evoke universal meaning. The formal framework for their evolution Andrews calls a 'totemic structure", something considered pre-individual. The icons are evoked, 'called up', so that a heart is seen but not quite