Andy Harper lives and works in Cornwall, on the southwestern edge of the United Kingdom. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting & Printmaking from Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton...
Andy
Harper lives and works in Cornwall, on the southwestern edge of the United
Kingdom. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting & Printmaking from
Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton and holds two Master of Arts degrees: one in
Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and one in Visual Culture from
Middlesex University, London. Harper has
exhibited widely in Europe, North America, and South Korea.
Unlike
almost all artists working in oil paint who allow paint to dry before adding a
layer, Harper works entirely with wet paint. He scrapes, amends and pushes the
wet paint to create a work which has only one layer but appears to have a lot
of depth. Each layer gels quickly, requiring rapid and precise mark making. He
paints dense tangles of foliage and natural matter in surreal swirls of color.
His paintings act as landscapes seen as if from the ground up, invoking the
inevitable process of growth and decay that occurs on the forest floor. His
titles are often borrowed from place names in the United Kingdom.
"[Each]
painting is witness to thousands of rapid decisions. Evidenced by every twist,
jerk, stroke, rhythm, division and line drawn into the wet paint. Like an
archaeological trace, each work extends my understanding of procedural
memory, visual thinking, pattern recognition, sensory processing,
neuroaethestics and haptic perception. Before long the resinous film
begins to stiffen and gel. Once dry, the painting is a record, not of the
visual world, but of thought." - Andy Harper
His visual vocabulary
has developed in two intertwined and almost scientific ways: one stems from a
questioning of studio practices as Harper tests the capacity of certain
implements; the other emerges from the close study of real organic matter. His
observation of existing plants, however, is deeply tied to his studio practice
and the two strands of his artistic method evolve together and, one could say,
simultaneously literally and figuratively. For Harper, these concerns also
connect to a wider context of the history of botany and the transportation of
plants around the globe.
In 1996,
Harper co-founded NotCut with peers from the Royal College of Art, which ran a
studio and photographic darkroom in London until 2010 and curated 'Lightness
& Weight' at the Custard Factory in Birmingham. He has taught both
nationally in the UK and internationally, holding posts at prestigious
institutions including Central St. Martins. Currently, Harper is a Senior
Lecturer on the MFA Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, University of London.