Artists & Illustrators - UK (2019-12)

34 Artists & Illustrators

also proved revelatory to a young Giff.

“It’s all just a pigment and a medium,”

he says. “When you understand that,

and the suspension of pigment, and

how some pigments are very fine,

which is what makes them

translucent... All that enables you to

make paintings full of light.”

That insight has also given him the

confidence to mix his own paint from

powdered L Cornelissen & Son

pigments, as well as making a glaze

medium he can adapt to suit each

picture. “It is basically dammar

crystals and I just soak them in

turpentine and add a refined linseed

oil and a cobalt siccative – just a tiny

bit makes it dry a bit quicker.”

It is perhaps this very rudimentary

view of paint as a substance that

helps Giff to be less precious when it

comes to reworking passages of paint

that others might be pretty happy with. He points to one

larger canvas that clearly won’t be leaving his studio today.

“At the moment, it looks a little too simple,” he says of the

Russian church outlined heavily against a vast, pastel

snowscape. His solution will be to soften the brushwork by

removing some of the paint with a rag and then glazing or

scumbling fresh colour on top.

Destruction is an important part of creation for Giff.

“If you smash it up with a rag, you get all these amazing

marks and the edges aren’t quite perfect,” he says. “I build

it up with a lot of this drying agent underneath, the Lukas

Medium 5, so then I can mash it up a little bit and look at

it for five minutes and by then it’s just tacky enough so I

can work over it with wet paint and it doesn’t all bleed in.”

For now though, the exhibition calls and any last changes

must stop. “I’ve put them all over there to get them out of

my head,” he says, gesturing at the corner of the room.

“When you’ve got this many paintings, you have to.”

Andrew’s next exhibition, Baltic Journey, runs from

21 November to 20 December at John Martin Gallery,

London W1. http://www.jmlondon.com/andrew-gifford

ABOVE Cathedral of

St Peter & Paul, oil

on panel, 36x34cm

LEFT Green Dacha,

St Petersburg,

February, oil on

panel, 50x50cm

I paint in a

bright studio

so when

those dark

colours are lit

normally, they

really glow