Chuck Mosley - 2017 portrait by Andrew Mcleay
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Feature artist 2020
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no barking aRt
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Sunday 07 June 2020
Shizico Yi. Curator- Sunday 07 June 2020, 2 pm, no barking aRt Feature Artist 2020
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You don’t need to know all these subjects he paints, from Margaret Thatcher, Jeremy Corbyn, David Bowie, Michael Barrymore, Chuck Mosley to Homeless folks, they are just the agencies for Andrew Mcleay to express the passion in life through portraiture. His portraiture reduces the world into these faces where you see mountains and rivers, you see the caress and care, you hear songs and music, all emotions in life are in these faces in his paintings and photographs. Human faces intrigue him, through his works one can see he looks into their eyes, he looks into the person which is not an easy thing for modern people to do. One might think that we are meeting people every day, but the truth is, most people don’t have time nor interest to care enough to just, look.
As an artist, especially a portraiture artist, one has to be able to look. Something about painters who paint portraits, they devote their attention fully on human faces because they simply just care. One of Mcleay's paintings alone captivated me to name one of the 7 parts of the exhibition, A World without End, as All too Human, and a journey of curating that new section began despite Mcleay’s submission came very late in the process. To curate a show like this open-end theme in such a short time, one needs a fuse to spark the imagination, and Mcleay’s body of work certainly brings my curatorial focus back to the core reason that why this show even exists, it is to serve and care for all these brilliant artists in a time of pandemic which echoes Mcleay’s aesthetic as an artist.
Days after the murder of George Floyd, Mcleay painted a portrait of him, with not just the likeness as a heartfelt tribute, but also the compassion one could see in his brushstrokes. There is no other medium better than portraiture to make art about the man who was brutally murdered under less than 9 minutes. Coincidentally Mcleay has been long practicing speedy portrait to facilitate his project on painting homeless, vulnerable people in his charity Ealing Soup Kitchen in order to highlight the inequality in our society and to fight for their welfare; in the last decade, his art and his paintbrush is the soup for the soul of these homeless people.
The legendary architect Le Corbusier once said “ I prefer drawing over speaking, drawing is faster and leaves less room for lies”, Mcleay’s speedy painting serves as a kind of drawing, with the speed in capturing these friends every day, he speaks truth on these canvases and with that, his portraits of Homeless Series speak no lies only loud passion and compassion one could feel and listen in these visual language he creates. Through food, he feeds love and cares to these homeless friends, through his portrait paintings, he shows love and respect to them who might never felt loved in that special way.
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One little known fact (besides, according to him, that he appeared on 15 to 1 a few years ago, and got every question wrong) that Mcleay is also a very talented photographer, especially (with no surprise) on portraiture. It is how he captures the faces through a camera that reveals so much who he truly is. He cares about human nature, he portrays them with his careful framing and precise clicks at these golden moments; not all photographers could nor would achieve that.
You can hear and feel his passion through his photographs of people; we can all take pictures of colours, natures, buildings, sky, landscape, and still life, but very few do humans successfully. It takes a person who cares enough and possesses the talent to make ‘sitters’ feel comfortable of being their authentic selves in front of that camera to get pictures like Mcleay’s photographs. Through viewing these collections of portrait pictures, I was able to finally understand the artist, that was the moment his works click with my conscious, from then on, I was able to understand his works in the most instinct human level. Through his photography, I see the essence of who he is as an artist and what makes him so good at what he does, because, he truly cares.
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To understand portraiture and portrait artists we also have to go back to the history of portraits and the unique culture of portraiture in the UK and European Art. There are tons of talents who paint like photographs, realistic to a point to just stun you with the impeccable skills, like Vermeer, who used mirrors, lens and tricks to achieve the realistic style of portraits; there are also artists like Van Gogh, Goya, who paints by freehand and freestyle, there is no trickery but observation and pure confidence with their brushes and their bodies. These type of portraiture can be found in the works of modern artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, who also are responsible for making the UK the heavyweight place in the world of portraiture; which is why events like the successor to the John Player Portrait Award, The BP Portrait Award, an annual portraiture competition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London is so popular in the UK for five decades and still going strong.
To practice portraiture in the UK in contemporary time, artists like Mcleay have to find their unique voice. From my point of view, his portraiture is on the side of Van Gogh, Freud, and Bacon’s which is freestyle and direct, where paintings leave little space for lies and trickery. One might wonder why do artists from Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo to Freud love to paint self-portraits? They are not just paintings for the loneliness but the passion and lust for life. Through painting oneself, one is free of judgment, artists see and caress oneself through the brushstrokes which lead to a healing process and the understanding of oneself. These studies of light, tone, and the shadow of a painting gained through self-portraits all feed into the paintings they made of others. Self-portraits of an artist complete the circle of a portrait artist from where one finds the reason to paint, in other words, to be a painter. There is no surprise to see many of Mcleay’s works are self-portraits.
Self portrait 2014 by Andrew Mcleay
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When you go to David Hockney’s retrospective in Tate Britain 2017, one learned that the true value of an artist lies in the lineage of ones’ whole body of work, in Hockney’s case, more than six decades of works. Each work, even the off-the-wall ones, the small ones come together to complete the whole picture of an artist. There would be moments of big splashes, moments of rises and falls, each artwork has its place to illustrate the whole career of an artist. In Mcleay’s decade of practice, all these speedy paintings he did every day become the mosaics of a great contemporary portrait painter.
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I do believe great artworks need a fundamental reason to be, otherwise, they are most likely studies of something, though they could be very successful studies and artworks. But in every great piece of art, there will always be a life, a soul in it; a great artwork is a living thing, that is the fine line between a great artwork and an artwork.
In the UK, we have abundant talents in portraiture; what makes Mcleay unique is how he sees human through his brushes and colours, he mixes compassion with paint to portray each face with greatest passion and lust for life, like Van Gogh, though without cutting one’s ear, Mcleay paints human suffer through love, that is what makes a good painter great.
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Sody by Andrew Mcleay
Andrew Mcleay Biography:
Andrew Mcleay (b. 1983) is an Australian born artist who lives in London. He is primarily a portrait artist, and has been painting since 2012. His work is often stylistically different from one portrait to the next & yet still uniquely identifiable through the use of brushstrokes and colour. His work is not merely capuring likenesses - It is about story telling - sometimes important, sometimes just interesting. As a Christian, he is often seeking out religious elements in his work; he seeks to understand the soul of the person from the face in his work & he will often find a spiritual connection between the subject & the artist. As an up-and-coming artist he has painted portraits of people all around the world, including some famous sitters with his favourite so far being Michael Barrymore. His work has been displayed all across Sydney & London & has had work displayed on TV & in newspapers. He has previously studied under masters like Tim Benson. 
Artist Statement
I have often found words extraneous and unnecessary. Much better is the way something makes us feel. That’s why I paint – paint rarely uses words to convey emotion but instead use colour, form, likeness, and an expression to write the story of a lifetime in a single brushstroke. That is real magic to me. Being able to show something so meaningful without having to utter a single word. Not only that, but have your story retold a thousand times and reinterpreted endlessly all by different people looking at the same thing, like an amazing game of Chinese Whispers, where no one knows exactly what was said but they will always remember how playing the game made them feel – excited, whimsical, alive. A lot of my work focuses on the plight of the homeless. This is because I have experienced it myself and I know how much many in this position appreciate a little effort. Doing portraits of them is a special thing that traditionally only the very rich or powerful were able to commission. So I wanted to turn the idea on its head by painting them gratis but also making sure they get to keep if they want. Any homeless paintings sold go back into the homeless charity I work for, Ealing Soup Kitchen. Homelessness AdvocateA documentary film about Andrew Mcleay
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