I’m fast approaching 40 now and I thought it was a good time to take a look at my face again. I’ve not really done that many self portraits before , mainly because I was busy doing commissions and other stuff and also because I never thought I had a very interesting face which makes quite a difference. Now that I’m nearly 40 my face has begun to age and seems more interesting to me now. There are wrinkles and sags starting to form and I find the aging process very interesting. A nice strong light helps too, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting enhances the face and detail. I think 40 is a good age to start and I think I may try and do a least one a year and follow Rembrandt’s example.
The first image features me and our dog Max. It was very spontaneous, I just saw Anne’s winter “Pixie hat” and decided to put it on and Max got in on the act and settled into the composition. I wanted dramatic lighting which traditionally would be accompanied by a dark background , pushing out the lighter detail, so often used by the old Italian master Caravaggio. I like the more clinical and modern white background which doesn’t detract from the 2 figures and focuses attention on me and Max, coupled with a tight edit. There is also a Richard Avedon feel to the portrait with the white background which wasn’t a concious decision but occured to me afterwards.
The second self portrait again picks up on the datail in my face but is a more traditional chiaroscuo lit portrait with the darker background as my face emerges from the shadows. It doesn’t necessarily depict mt character, I look quite sinister in this portrait, which I can assure you that I’m not so I guess there is a sense of acting for the portrait or role play, again a traditional theme in portraiture.
Both portraits are in charcoal, carbon and graphite. “Max and Andy” – ( after Max and Paddy) is around A1 in size and the other portrait ” September 2008″ is around A4 in size.
September 30th, 2008
Here is a new press release from My gallery in Santa Fe ,Andreeva, regarding their recent successful sale of two of my paintings to The Smithsonian Institute in Washingto DC.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Smithsonian/portraits/prweb1263134.htm
I’ll be posting some new work in the next 2 weeks or so.
September 11th, 2008
I will be doing a series of 3 talks about my work at the National Portrait Gallery next year in their excellent lecture theatre. They are scheduled for 15th, 16th, and 17th June 2009 in the morning of each day and will coincide with the opening of next years BP Portrait Awards.
The talks will focus upon all of the portraiture works that I have done from 1991 to present day. It will largely be in sequence from my early work in 1991 when I was working on my MA project and I will explain my thoughts, reasons and techniques behind each of the portraits. I will be discussing paintings and drawings and showing sequences depicting the build up/progress of a selection of my paintings. I would imagine that the talks will last around one and a half hours and are primarily aimed at school groups but I’m sure that they wouldn’t mind small individual groups attending too.
If you would like to know any more about these 3 events please contact Tanja Gangar, (Learning Manager at the NPG) on;
[email protected]
August 10th, 2008
Here is the second picture of the fantastically aesthetic Bandana. He is a Hell’s angel that I know from The Rising Sun pub in Walsall, just down the road from me, which is a bikers pub that is run by the Hells Angels. I did a painting of him earlier in the year using dramatic chiaroscuro lighting with quite intense eyes looking out at the viewer. (please see earlier posts for description and photograph). Here I have done a drawing which is more detached in feel and he is in thought as we talked. This is quite a big drawing and is done in charcoal, graphite and carbon on paper.
July 5th, 2008
I went to the opening of the BP Awards last week and the announcement and dinner on Monday evening which was lovely. Ian Hislop announced the awards and gave a great speech…extremely funny infact. “I don’t know a lot about art…..no that’s it” was his opening gambit.
Overall I enjoyed the show but as many are now saying there is a little too much photorealism. I remember back in the mid 90’s when there was only the excellent Philip Harris and me doing it and and then the show was criticised for being too much like Freud and Euglow in style. It has certainly turned right around but those mid 90’s shows did seem more varied. I think it is the impact of digital photography over the past 5 years or so has made a big impact. It has absolutely revolutionised the way that I work and I love photography more than ever before now. The digital revolution is just wonderful and I think artists/ painters are captivated by the ease and absolute control you have with digital photography and it’s seemingly limitless possibilities that they want to incorporate it into their work. Certainly I never leave the house without a little snapper, even the cheapest little cameras give excellent quality results and I’m snapping and thinking all the time and the images are so disposable you can take as many pictures as you want and review them when you get home. Just incredible, and I think this is the reason that we are seeing so much photorealism at the moment, artists are just responding to modern technology, as I think they should.
My own personal favourites are Jason Walkers “Natalie” which I think should certainly have made the shortlist again, great use of pattern in a painting and beautifully muted tonal colour and the Mexican artist who came second in 2006 Raphael Rodriguez Cruz with a portrait of a woman with so much pain in her expression it almost reduces you to tears just looking at it – very powerful I think and nice to see Paul Benney again, one of the past heavyweights from the competition with his beautifully composed Californian looking swimming pool portrait.
June 22nd, 2008
This is the portrait that I have been working on for the past 5 – 6 months I think it was. I have previously made an update when I finished the figure and the two dogs and here is the finished painting. It is nearly 4′ tall so it’s quite a big one and is acrylic on fine grain portraiture canvas. I wanted it to be quite a bright and vibrant painting so I have used a lot of complementary colours with the reds and greens which are two colours that I think work beautifully together if you get the right tones so the green of Doreen’s jumper works just right with that tone of red in the sofa and her hair. The sofa was quite a challenge and took about 6-7 weeks to complete, people can’t believe that I want to do that kind of detail but I think patterns in paintings work extremely well , like this sofa or maybe a William Morris print or something like that, especially when juxtaposed to a flat area. I wanted to get something of Doreen’s petiteness so I thought that it would be a good device to plant her in the middle of a large sofa with her foot just resting above the floor. As I say I wanted it to be lively in colour, almost Fauvist in some ways, but I also wanted to get a calmness and a stillness to the portrait which is where their wonderful dogs came in. Having them rested and almost asleep gives the restful quality which I was looking for and in some way they also seem like they are guarding Doreen. While I was doing all of the preliminary work at their house the dog on the left kept licking my face and ear at every opportunity and was extremely friendly. As I said previously it’s the first time I have ever painted dogs in a portrait and they were lovely to depict and really add to the overall composition, – (but please, no requests for pet portraits, even though I love dogs).
June 22nd, 2008
Around 10 years ago I did a painting for The New Art Gallery, Walsall about the death of my grandparents called Memorial Painting. It was a large 8 foot diptych featuring on one side their empty rooms and on the other panel 26 objects from that room. As I stood in that room there was a sense of absence, reflection and emptiness and the objects brought back and provoked many memories for me. The objects seemed to reflect and reinforce their identity and sudenly these everyday, banal items, which in truth, were about ready for the bin had suddenly become incredibly significant and precious. The act of painting the objects seemed to elevate their importance from the merely banal, something so worthless seemed suddenly valuable. The objects viewed in isolation set against a white background and then painted seems to make us re-evaluate their significance and sense the human sentiment which is retained within these objects. I see these objects as being directly related to portraiture because even though there are no people depicted in the Memorial Painting, it is still very much a portrait of two people.
I wanted to develop this theme a little further. I’ve been collecting interesting objects from junk shops etc… which seem to have some poetic beauty within them, touched by some profound sentiment or relationship and damaged in some way asif it has lived a life and is almost organic but unfortunately just about ready for the bin. Then through whatever chanel they end up in my hands and take on a new life as a piece of art. I’ve used 3-D objects before in my portraiture, for example car doors and car wings which I have painted on and I like the play between 2-D and 3-D. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I wanted to develop it further and suddenly the idea came to me to use the actual object alongside the painting creating a diptych which is another reoccuring theme in my work, so it all seemed to fit beautifully. Very broardly my work is about objective reality, making paintings which are as real looking and convincing as I can possibly get them. So, I made an exact scale drawing of the object ,(The first is an old Pre WW1 Beatrix potter book and the secong is a 45 single by Elvis inscribed with “To my Darling Ron, Happy Valentines Day”). I did the drawing on the left and continued to do a 2-D still life painting of the object and then to the right of the painting is mounted the actual origional 3-D object. The painting is almost like a clone, or in this case, I refer to them as “Doppelgangers”. The 2 seem to feed off eachother, at first glance they seem strangely identical, juxtaposed together, but then your eyes seem to work out that one is flat and the other is 3-D. In some ways there is also a link with the old trickery of Trompe l’ oil, but that was never a concious thing, just a bi- product when I looked at the finished thing. It is always about the object and it’s relationship with the people who once owned it and responding to its imbued poetry and sentiment.
(Just click on the image to enlarge)
May 26th, 2008
Please click on the link to read:
http://www.birminghampost.net/tags/andrew-tift/
Here is another interview from a magazine called “Varsity” which is produced by Cambridge university and I think was very nicely written. http://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/118/3/
May 26th, 2008
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC have puchased 2 of my paintings for their permanent collection. It is reputed to be the biggest museum in the world and this is my first acquisition into a major American collection so I’m delighted to have some of my work represented there.
The 2 paintings are both portraits of very eminent American figures; Cormac McCarthy and Murray Gellman.
I first met them in 2004 when my gallery invited me over to Santa Fe, New Mexico to do a portrait based project exploring “The people of New Mexico” where I drove around the state looking for interesting faces. Cormac and Murray were based at a “think tank/ research unit ” situated in the middle of the New Mexican desert where they develop their own projects and hold philosophical discussions around tables.
I would like to thank The Andreeva Gallery in Santa Fe and especially Pam for her relentless enthusiasm and professionalism in placing the works into the Smithsonian’s collection over the past few months and also special thanks to Francisco for his generosity and kind gesture.
Cormac McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the greatist living American writers. In 1992 he wrote “All the Pretty Horses” which was later made into a film starring Matt Damon. In 2005 he wrote “No Country for Old Men” which more recently was made into a film directed by the Coen brothers starring Tommy Lee Jones and won 4 Academy Awards at this years Oscars including “Best Film”. In 2007 he won The Pulitzer Prize for literature. He is notoriously reclusive and very rarely gives interviews so I was incredibly lucky to get him to sit for me in Santa Fe, I think something just clicked between us and we seemed to get on.
Murray Gell-Mann is a world renowned Physicist who has made discoveries and developments in “Quantum Physics” and in 1969 he won the Nobel Prize for physics. I loved his “eccentric scientist” look and the fact that he wore a Native American Indian bootlace tie.
May 5th, 2008
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