Artists & Illustrators — June 2017

20 Artists & Illustrators

MASTERCLASS

Gogh as a schoolgirl or engaging with Abstract

Expressionism, her style has always been something all her

own. If it can be said to have roots, the paintings find their

essence in the British landscape – the lure of the sea and

the sky – which she has repeatedly sought out.

“She has always quietly and doggedly gone her own way,”

says Andrew. “But I think the interest in the texture and

thickness of paint, and in finding ways to describe

landscapes in a non-literal way, relate to people like Peter

Lanyon. She is certainly very un-American.”

Later into the 1970s and during the 1980s, Gillian began

to use thick and heavy impasto to create paintings that

were exhilaratingly charged with emotion. She went to live

on the remote Lly^^ n Peninsula in North Wales in 1981, a

move which seemed to herald this particularly fertile

period, dubbed by Andrew as her ‘furious impasto’ stage.

It was around this time he first stumbled across her work.

He tells us: “I think I first saw Gillian’s work at the Royal

Academy Summer Exhibition in the early 1980s, just after

I’d arrived in London for the first time. I can remember an

almost visceral thrill at the complexity of the thinking and

the dense working; I bought a cheap commercial poster of

one of the paintings and had it hanging in my flat for years.”

The ‘furious impasto’ paintings, which she produced into

the 1990s, remain a career highlight, says the broadcaster,

with the 1990 painting A Midsummer Night at the pinnacle

for its “complexity and remarkable energy”. It’s this fruitful

phase that the Cardiff exhibition explores, featuring the

artist’s greatest works from the 1950s to 1980s.

Andrew hopes this rare chance to see a large body of

Gillian’s work in one place will redress another problem of

her profile – the difficulty of seeing her work. As well as her

desire to work away from the cut and thrust of the art

world, the artist lost an important body of work in a

warehouse fire and her early Tachist pictures are hard to

find. “I wish more people knew where they could see her

work,” says Andrew. “The very early wall paintings, which

you can find at South Hampstead High School, are well

worth a trek. She shows every summer, of course, at the

RA. I sometimes stand and watch, and her work always

seems to attract a cluster of gapers.”

But it’s Gillian’s life-long passion for paint that keeps

Andrew enthralled with her work, as well as establishing

her as one of Britain’s most important working artists. As

an amateur painter, it is the process of mark-making,

leading to image-making – which can bypass the brain and

connect to something more primal – that truly inspires him.

“She can organise a very complex and large space,

throbbing with energy and always on the edge of chaos, yet

holding itself together right at the end,” says the

broadcaster. “It’s a plate-spinning display of confident élan,

and if I was ever able to paint something a third as good as ALL WORKS OF ART REPRODUCED COURTESY OF GILLIAN AYRES

18 Gillian Ayres.indd 20 10/04/2017 12: