Hugh Anderson Painter
Paintings
Recent Works (and a few others)
What follows is a further update on my text of 2021 when retirement and then lockdown gave me the chance to return to painting and the opportunity of indulging myself in trying to express visually my reactions to the wondrous world about me.
I spent my working life as an architect and have lived for the most part in cities, though I maintain a love for the wide open spaces of my childhood. What does this mean then to how I approach the world and how does it affect the way I try to express myself?
I guess it’s the tension between the man-made and the natural world that interests me, that which is organised and rational (at least in human terms) and that which is organic and free, or that which is fresh and clean and that which is despoiled yet beautiful with the patina of human use. We are attuned to the wear and tear of old cities but what of the discolouration of concrete or oil-stained tarmac? These materials hold beauty also, but are burdened with a prejudice born of over familiarity or modern association, so too the familiarity of street furniture and contemporary building materials. Yet there is a wonderful rhythm to be seen in railings, or in the repetition of windows, especially when they intersect with other repeated, man-made, standard objects.
It is these ‘reasonable’ but uncelebrated subjects that I find myself returning to after a career of trying to organise our environment, maybe not with a sense of conquest and domination over our natural world, but at least with a sense of commonality and humility, to be expressed in the looseness of paint.
HA: Nov 2025
About
I practiced for many years as an architect, but always painting and sketching. Since retirement I have enjoyed painting more consistently and in 2019/2020 I spent six months on a painting ‘sabbatical’ in the South African Karoo. This website is therefore mostly a way of letting my family and friends see what I have been up to. Many people have said that they would like to buy something and this website also gets over that awkward part of selling.
I am reluctant to call myself an artist because the term implies a degree of quality and professionalism. At the same time I would like to think that I take the task of expression seriously, and, like any painter, I do have ideas about what I am trying to say. Thus there are themes which have always interested me and which I continue to try and explore: the quality of space and light; the boundary between realism and abstraction, the layering of information and in particular man’s impact on the natural world. In South Africa, for instance, it was the complex way in which man had affected the Earth from prehistoric, through colonial to modern times that affected me. In Britain it is the same way that man has either cultivated or despoiled the world around us. It is part of the beauty we see in the order and disorder of our cities and that which we take as being ‘country’.
My paintings are therefore my small contribution towards a way of seeing the world and might just coincide with the views of others.
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