About Andrew

Chairman of the Bath Society Of Artists, Winner of the 2016 Royal Watercolour Society Exhibitions Award and the 2016 David Simon Contemporary Art Prize. Selected by the Friends of The Scott Polar Research Institute to be their resident artist in Antarctica for 2019, showing at Bonhams, New Bond Street in 2020, the SPRI's centenary year. 
Andrew has exhibited at the Royal Academy in successive years, the Royal West of England Academy and numerous shows at the Mall Galleries, including RI, RSMA, NEAC, RBA, Sunday Times Watercolour and Lynn Painter Stainers Prize. His work is held in private and corporate collections in the UK, Europe and China. Commissioning clients include King & McGaw, John Lewis Partnership, The European Thermal Towns Association (ETTHA), The Royal United Hospital, Bath Building Society and The Roman Baths.
Andrew generates work from whichever source is most directly accessible. This may entail a variety of material abstractions or work directly related to impressions and experience of the landscape. The source of his inspiration is the fabric of nature. Paint, as earth and water, is regarded as a natural element in itself, rather than as a simple a tool for imitating nature. Paintings are often conceived in a moment and then take time to unfold. Conversely, paintings are also 'unconceived' as initial plans are let go in response to the physical nature of the medium and the unfolding unpredictability of creation. In using raw pigments combined with a variety of mediums he achieves a direct connection to the elemental quality of landscape. Working in this way can be explosively fast and at other times may be meticulously analytical.

"Andrew Lansley's egg tempera landscapes show a distinct presence in the British tradition of draughtsmanly painting. Subjects and colours seek outer edges: a small boat abandoned in a sea of grasses; refulgent fields and trees ghostly under solar eclipse; last leaves wind shredded above richer browns of hillside ferns. Lansley's art opens painting to music's dimension of time."
Jerrold Northrop Moore - author of The Green Fuse: Pastoral Vision in English Art 1820-2000, and biographer of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and F.L Griggs.
Jerrold Northrop Moore wrote The Green Fuse - a history of the tradition of visionary English landscape painting. He is also the official biographer of Elgar.
Moore also wrote the following:

"Andrew Lansley
Each of the artists included in my history of English visionary painting The Green Fuse, has contributed something distinguished to the tradition founded by Samuel Palmer and now entering its third century. Palmer's distinction from his own magister Blake was to take visionary drawing and painting to fill the landscapes of an entire career. The ongoing tradition has included the master of romantic etching F.L. Griggs, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and the Ruralists. Had I been writing the book today, I would've made another chapter onwards to include the artwork of Andrew Lansley.

While still a student, Lansley discerned for himself Palmer's seldom noticed use of egg tempera to light a dark painting such as Coming from Evening Church with the glimpse of vision. And he, as much is any Palmer disciple over the centuries, has expanded the use of tempera to fill all his art.
Lansley writes of his discovery of a tempera painting in Palmer's art:

'His light and touch and feeling for atmosphere seems to describe more than just the objects and features of the landscape. I noticed that he uses transparency for laying colours over drawing. ... He was painting the stuff you cannot see - not dark matter, but light. The narrative is the correspondence between inner and outer worlds. This is what fascinates me. …
'At about the same time I discover the work of David Tindall … featured in a TV programme … As soon as I saw him cracking the egg and talking about his process, I knew this was how I wanted to paint. He painted against the light so that the objects became very pale - often set against an open window with a gossamer net curtain floating in the ethereal opening.'

That led him to the tempera haunted painting of the American Andrew Wyeth. Lansley concludes:

'Working with raw pigments gives the paint an authenticity that I find lacking in commercial oil or acrylic. The colours come direct from the earth they depict. There is nothing interfering with the colour. The egg yolk that go on that binds becomes invisible and does not blacken with age.'

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He limits his colours to 'earth brown ochres and greens' with occasional help from half a dozen more. 'Layers of paint can be roughed in with big brushes and then refined over time, developing into skins of parallel or dancing marks. The translucency if the paint imitates the way need to build up its colours.'

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With this in mind, one traces the excursion of Lansley's subjects from town through country holding the old house, farm machine or upturned boat in long grass within sight of water and storm towards abstraction. I greatly look forward to this young artist's enlarging journeys through earth and water and elements of lighter gravity."

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Spring 2016. Jerrold Northrop Moore

Andrew is also the owner of WalkAndDrawBath, which aims to facilitate others' creative process.

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Through the vehicle of WalkAndDrawBath Andrew connects with a wide range of client groups and individuals. He hosts events and workshops with a variety of organisations, including Bath Artists Studios, Creativity Works, The American Museum and The Holburne Museum.