Andy Cropper

Andy Cropper

Things are important.

Things? Ephemeral moments, glimpses that catch your gaze. Mundane spaces, moments and actions that hold your attention and seem to freeze time.

Andy is interested in serendipity - "happy accidents", "mini-sublimes" - and the emotions that come about from noticing them. Familiar examples might be a water droplet dribbling down the side of a glass, a speck of dust in a shaft of sunlight or a magnificent sunset over the brow of a hill.

It is not a case of something being beautiful or filled with huge momentous meaning, sometimes he will respond to something without truthfully knowing why. For some reason, at one moment of time, a thing has importance.

This may suggest photography as being a way to go, but Andy wants to reconstruct the moment that has passed. He wants to pay homage to it, actively deconstruct it, then reconstruct it, adding himself to the mix as after all he is the person that had the moment and choosing to portray it. Some of the photos he takes, if enlarged, would become seriously uninteresting but by the action of painting, having made an image out of many marks, it gains a vibrancy, a texture, which is substantially different to a photograph even if the initial impression of his work is photographic.

Being a painter he is unable to capture these moments immediately and photography can miss them or lose the emotional connection as it records the event. He uses his camera as a sketchbook, to test, record and then expand on.

He is not aiming to glamorise the mundane, but searching to find interest in the things around us that we usually ignore. There are fascinating uncanny things, often unobserved around each of us. He is interested in those things that we miss, that we tend to use 'entertainment' to distract us from. He is fascinated by the world around him not in an engaging way, but as an observer. He loves watching the world go by. He is a voyeur.

Andy's work can appear kaleidoscopic when viewed in its entirety but for this show he has selected works that are reactions specifically to external urban spaces around the area of Sheffield that he moves within.

Examples of Work -

 
Shutters
Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

 
Posters
Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

 
Cardboard
Oil on panel, 25 x 25 cm

   
X Marks The Spot
Oil on panel, 25 x 25 cm

Bio - Andy was born in Bristol in the early 70's, and grew up in Blackpool in the 80's and he came to study painting at Sheffield Hallam in the 90's. He was artist in residence in the Sheffield Winter Gardens from 2008-2009 and it was in this time he painted the then Liberal Democrat Leader of Sheffield Council Paul Scriven. He was the first artist in the Moor Window Gallery in 2010. He says "I'm a painter responding to the world around me and using what is in front of me as source. I'm not a painter of dreams, desires, distractions or romances."

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0114 255 2037