Learning to Lose the Edges: Hurvin Anderson
There are some exhibitions you enjoy, some you admire, and then there are those that send you back to your studio raring to go. This summer Hurvin Anderson's exhibition at Tate Britain belonged firmly in the latter category.
Standing in front of Anderson’s paintings, what stuck me was the sheer exuberance of colour. Extraordinary blues, acid greens, flashes of pink and yellow. Colours that might seem outrageous in isolation but somehow make perfect sense together. Anderson uses his palette to build atmosphere, suggest memory and create an emotional response to a place. A blue might be intensely blue, a green almost impossibly green, yet the painting feels entirely convincing. Values and temperatures work.
Living by the sea in Hastings, I'm surrounded by changing light, wonderful greys and an endless supply of blues (or should that be the other way around). So since the Tate I've been challenging myself to look beyond the obvious. Why shouldn't a grey sky contain pink? Or a shadow have a surprising flash of violet? The trick, of course, is making these unexpected colours work together rather than having them all competing for attention. Anderson makes it look wonderfully effortless. I suspect it isn't.
The second lesson, for me, is from Anderson’s movement between representation and abstraction. A recognisable landscape might dissolve into loose passages of paint. A tree becomes a collection of marks. Shapes overlap, edges disappear, and a seemingly unfinished area becomes one of the most interesting parts of the painting. Yet there's often something precise holding the whole composition together. A line, a grid, a sharply defined shape (and colour, always colour).
This is where the tension lies - how much information does a viewer actually need? What happens if I leave that edge alone, resist the temptation to tidy up a shape, or allow some of the underpainting to remain visible? I've been trying to do more of this in my own paintings, particularly my seascapes and fishing boats. It turns out that knowing when to stop painting something can be considerably harder than painting it in the first place.
Of course, there's much more to Anderson's paintings than his extraordinary handling of paint. Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, his work explores memory, identity and belonging, moving between Britain and the Caribbean. Windows, fences and dense foliage often interrupt our view, making us wonder whether we're looking into a place or being kept outside it. These aren't simply paintings of places, but of how we remember them, experience them and feel connected to them. My own relationship with landscape is very different, but the question is an interesting one. Am I painting what a place looks like, or what it feels like to be there? Increasingly, I hope it's the latter.
I had so many favourites. Every time I walked into another room, I shuffled the order. But having bought the exhibition book (and the poster!), I keep coming back to Imperial, with its wonderful evocation of a particular place and time. The faded pink buildings, the tangle of wires and that great wall of dark green foliage. There's something both beautiful and slightly melancholy about it. And then I caught my friend staring at Audition. Her face lit up as she read the caption. Anderson had constructed the painting from overlapping photographs of Wyndley Swimming Pool in Birmingham. So, yes, this was the very pool where she'd learnt to swim, only seen in reverse. A painting about memory had brought back a rather wonderful one of her own.
What I love most about discovering artists who really excite me is that their work gives me permission to experiment. Not to copy, but to be braver. To simplify a composition, exaggerate a colour, lose an edge or allow an area of paint to do something unexpected. Trust that the viewer can complete parts of the picture without everything being carefully spelt out. Some experiments work, some are swiftly painted over. But that's part of the fun!
Thanks to Hurvin Anderson and Tate Britain for a fabulous, and inspirational, day out.
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