Andrew Heath and the Studio
Ideas for my paintings come from a psychological and emotional place inside. They come from wondering and musing on memories and feelings. Ideas don’t come to me in words and don’t have one clear translation in prose. I try to find a visual way of portraying and resolving some of my human experience.
Looking back at previous work is like opening a diary. The process in my painting is evolutionary, some elements come and go and others get developed, perhaps because they fit better with the overall half-known direction. There is always a core to my work which I feel is progressing in any new piece I’m working on and centres on my exploration of the human figure and its surroundings.
Previous work has been of intertwining or overlapping figures, dancing, swimming or flying and I’ve also played with pattern and colour to veil or emphasise different aspects.
More recently I have been using a reduced but more complex colour range and the figures are fewer and more separate. Increasingly I’ve become interested in the arena between abstraction and representation, also in the space between figures and the shapes between parts of the same figure. It’s as if all my paintings are generations of the same family, some likenesses in the family are always there, others spring up again after a time by surprise, and new elements also influence the direction.
