Andrew Hillary

Andrew Hillary

Painter

London
United Kingdom

I was painting a lot in my early years; I used to sell paintings through a gallery in Hammersmith in the early 1980’s. This was followed by a long gap as I went and worked in different parts of the media and different parts of the world including Germany and the Middle East. During this time I basically never picked up a brush and it was as a culmination of the last 24 years life experience that created a need to start painting again.

I am a photographer as well as an artist and see both activities as different notes on the same scale. The photographs mingle with both drawing and paintings, one informs the other, the act of taking a photograph is filled with a multitude of decisions, it is the same with painting, the difference is that the process is more protracted.

Every subject under the sky is open to interpretation and I tend to paint -photograph a wide range of different things, places and people. I like to create literal and representative pictures, it is the subversion from making things look as though they should be familiar, when in actuality they are not. Things are rarely what they seem. I am not interested in sequences only contrasts and as an artist I behave like an image junky, always with one eye on the next image, impatient to move on.

The paintings on this site are constantly being re-worked and will evolve over a period of months. The photographs lead into new ideas and are catalysts to discovering new contexts. I find that themes in art, limit both artist and the viewer. Each image is a moment that is captured and given a context. It is the context that should resonate with the observer and leave them with the feeling that ‘something is going on here’ even if they are not sure what it is.