Some Stories

Some Stories

My perennial engagement with the portrait continued in 2018 after I completed a large mosaic commission for the embassy in Paris. That work is a wall size mural of a crowd. Being one small part of something larger is both a simple and a complex idea, one that has been recurring in my work for a long time.

Upon returning home from France, I decided to start putting names to the faces in the crowds once again. Remembering my early works Facsimile and Sonnets it felt important to revisit that process of picture making and couple it with the techniques from my recent mosaic work to produce this new series of portraits.

Pixelation had returned to my daily visual vocabulary. Facial recognition software imaging, social media censorship, Minecraft and the sometimes slow uploading of Instagram content all share the same lo-fi pixelated look. With these new portraits instead of eulogizing my community I thought it would be interesting to celebrate those people around me that I loved or admired, people who were making a difference.

I have been studying physics recently and it has been firing my imagination. Consequently, I have been rereading my working process through a more scientific lens. In these new portraits, Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio are at play in the determining of sizes of the brushstrokes and their relationships to each other. Concepts of particles and fields dance poetically with the picture’s figures and backgrounds.

This theme began with a series of paintings of starscapes of whose dust we are all made. Those paintings’ tessellated surfaces with their imbricated ‘pixels’ aren’t only particles of reflected light assembled into a night sky, or a likeness, but are also like the grains of sand in an hourglass. Each coloured mark can be a single moment picturing the passage of time, each portrait an encounter, a relationship, a story.

Stephen Andrews
January 7, 2025