Andrew Whamond   

 Artists Statement

Aspects of Being

Each of my works seeks to isolate a particular aspect of what it is to be human, the condition of being mortal, and to intensify that perceived state or emotion through the process of painting, intertwining elements of personal history into a symbolic language of the body capable of communicating in as meaningful way as possible.Every work is a representational painting of an emotionally resonant abstract subject visualised using an experienced situation.

                                     Book introduction by the writer Paul Bailey.

Whamond is not always a figurative painter, though he does use the human body as his starting point.A dislocated head, abandoned in space, is a delightful as well as disconcerting pictorial conceit.  Sometimes the shapes are distorted suggesting that they have been seen in an hallucination.

The word “phantasmagoria” seems appropriate to describe these eerie works.  Legs, hands, eyes, a face captured in a truncated profile –These are images of incompleteness: of bits and pieces of ourselves that Whamond has chosen to isolate, as a reminder (perhaps) of the fragility of our condition.  “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”  Yeats’s caution might be Whamond’s own.  These are humane anatomy lessons.  “Look”, they seem to be saying, “this is what we are made of.”

Andrew Whamond is a thoughtful painter.  There are many painters who are absentees from contemplation, but he isn’t of their number.

He passes the crucial test of all good artists.  The disinterested spectator is granted the gift of his intelligence in addition to his undoubted ability with the materials at his considered disposal.