Andrew wrote the foreword for this beautifully produced volume which spans the artists 60 year career, from her student days to the very latest works. It includes all of her major paintings and has a dedicated section on her substantial body of prints.
To quote Andrew from the introductory paragraph in an article he wrote under the title 'England's answer to Jackson Pollock: is Gillian Ayres our greatest living painter? Andrew writes "It is really very simple. A good painting is a number of coloured marks, made by hand, brush or roller, across a flat surface, so that later a viewer can absorb emotional and intellectual energy from it. Arguments about figuration or abstraction; claims for art-historical “importance”; and estimates of cash value are all secondary – indeed almost meaningless – by comparison. Do the marks on the surface claw their way into your mind – once seen, never to be forgotten? A good painter is simply an individual who has, over a period of time, produced many good paintings. By this reckoning, Gillian Ayres has to be one of Britain’s finest.' You can read the rest in the article online in the Telegraph
Published to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff, the largest exhibition of Ayres’s work ever seen in the UK, this book spans her long career, from her student days to the most recent works. It includes all of her major paintings, and a dedicated section on her substantial body of prints. An added bonus included in the book are many previously unpublished photographs of the artist in the studio and at home and other ephemeral materials, making the publication the complete word on this acclaimed and original artist’s life and work. The monograph featuring over 400 pages, and 300 illustrations, and besides the foreword by Andrew Marr there are texts by author and art critic, Martin Gayford and David Cleaton-Roberts of the Alan Cristea Gallery.
Unconventional in life and in work, she has forged her own individual path regardless of fashion or opinion. Not wishing to conform or to be categorized in any way, Ayres has adopted a variety of styles and techniques throughout her career.
In the 1950s, she applied oils and household paint with rags and brushes, and by pouring and squirting, in gestural works reminiscent of European tachiste painting and American abstract expressionism. She was a leading figure in a generation of British artists who were responding to the latest international developments in Paris and New York, including the work of American Abstract Expressionists.
In the 1960s, she created light-filled images in oils or acrylics in keeping with the hedonistic and optimistic mood of that time.
In the 1970s, she approached the canvas as an expanse to be filled with an extreme and painterly alloverness. Later in that decade and into the 1980s, she began to use thick and heavy impasto in carefully designed arrangements; and in recent decades, she has developed a distinctive style of simplified organic motifs and areas of flat yet intense colour.
Quoting Andrew again from the Telegraph article 'Getting “it”, however, requires a lot of patience, a great deal of strategy. Ayres has spoken about how much of her time is spent looking at a work in progress rather than standing up and making marks. Describing what is going on inside her head, or any painter’s head, at that point, is probably impossible. But in the successful picture that follows, a daring dance of great complexity has been completed. Shapes echo and answer across space. Colours call, respond and smash into each other. And, just to make it harder, the shapes and colours are the same thing. The eye jumps and jumps and jumps. I have a picture by Ayres that I look at every day of my life and I still cannot understand how she could hold and resolve such exhilarating complexity in her head.'
Andrew's own practice as an artist is greatly influenced by the likes of Gillian Ayres but this was a positive decision Andrew took after his stroke in 2013 to free himself of the restraints of representational painting so that he could really express himself and paint the joie de vive literally for him given what he had been through and the joie de vive of painting boldly in vibrant colours and working hard to record in paint moments in his new life post stroke as well as happy times gone with family and good friends.
Further Reading
Abstract artist Gillian Ayres: painting against the tide by Martin Gayford, Telegraph 28/01/10
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