ANDREWS, Michael (Norwich, 1928 – London, 1995)
Michael Andrews was born 30 October 1928, in Norwich. His upbringing was strictly Methodist (protestant nonconformist) and conventional. From 1949–1953 he studied at the Slade School of Art in London University, taught principally by William Coldstream and, occasionally, by Lucian Freud. His contemporaries included the painters Craigie Aitchison, Euan Uglow, Paula Rego and Victor Willing. He won a prize for his painting A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over, performed with the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, in a short film Together directed by Lorenza Mazetti and went to Rome on a scholarship, but soon returned to London and the bohemian social life that he had come to enjoy.
His early work was distinguished for its ambitious reinvention of conventional genres, most notably the large composition My Family in the Garden (bought by the Gulbenkian Foundation) and The Deer Park derived from the novel by Norman Mailer.
A notoriously slow worker, whose diffidence masked an unswerving determination, Andrews took to producing paintings in series, starting with a triptych Good and Bad at Games (1964–1967) and expanding, during the seventies, into the series of seven paintings that he called Lights concerned with alienation and The Journey of the Soul, the metaphysical quest that he realised as a sequence of images of a balloon in flight and potential landing places. Later series included School (schools of fish) and paintings of deer stalking in the Scottish Highlands.
He held his first retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1980.
In 1983 Andrews went to Australia, a rare venture abroad, specifically to see Ayers Rock. From 1984–1990 he painted the Rock on a large scale, regarding it as an ultimate destination, a wonderful rock of infinite mystery offering emotional security.
After spending some years living in rural Norfolk, near Norwich, Andrews and his wife and daughter returned to London in 1992. There he began a series to do with the Thames. Having completed the first he underwent an operation for cancer in 1994, succeeded in completing the second painting The Estuary and died in July 1995. His Lights paintings were exhibited at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, in 2000 and the second, definitive, retrospective was mounted at Tate Britain in 2001.
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