Between Light, Nature and Abstraction: The Creative Journey of Annabel Andrews
I started very young, living in a natural environment on the Isle of Wight in England. There was no TV, no Internet, no iPhone, no iPad. Trees and animals, the countryside — they were our toys. Our curiosity was focused on nature, observing things very closely. At school, from an early age, we took Royal Drawing Society exams, and every year we were examined. We had an excellent art teacher, who had studied at the renowned Slade School of Fine Art in London, and she taught and encouraged us. I was good at drawing and took all the exams. I always got top marks, and that made me think I could do well.
When I finished school, I was going to study Fine Art, but I was offered a good job in London, so I didn’t go on to study art formally. The job was interesting because I had to take X-rays, draw them, and reduce them for publication in books — some publications with my X-ray drawings are still around. In London, I shared a flat with a girl who had studied Fine Art and worked for an advertising company; she was an illustrator and I started painting at weekends — she taught me a lot. Upstairs lived an Australian, Brian Robertson, who also painted and worked in advertising, and he taught me some tricks too. He later became famous as an art critic for, I believe, The Guardian.
Years later, I moved to the Canary Islands. There, I attended a local municipal workshop with a sculptor, Abraham Cárdenas, and I began working in sculpture. I also took a correspondence course in the Parramón technique from Barcelona, which lasted three years. It was thrilling to send in my work and wait for the results and corrections — I learned all the techniques. I started painting many oil landscapes. I even won a local competition and began doing portraits at the English Club in Las Palmas — everyone wanted to pose, including the British consul.
Later, I moved to Madrid with my family, and there I studied for two years at the Peña Academy in Plaza Mayor. I learned many techniques and we painted from life models. Afterwards, I took two intensive and very important workshops in contemporary art at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The first was with José Guerrero, who had come from New York’s abstract expressionist school. He deeply influenced and inspired me towards colour and abstraction. Sadly, he returned to New York, and I then joined the second workshop with another great Spanish painter, Pablo Palazuelo, whose work was geometric and constructivist. He also had a strong influence on my work. The two workshops were somewhat antagonistic — Guerrero’s was very emotional, visceral and intuitive, while Palazuelo’s was logical and cerebral, very rational and structured. Both shaped the path of my artistic work, and both became close friends who supported and encouraged me to pursue my artistic journey.
My main inspiration comes from the woodland landscape that surrounds me here in the Sierra of Madrid. The backlighting through the trees is what draws me most — the light behind things, and the light in the distance, like a longing to go towards it. It’s a yearning to reach a place you don’t quite know. Walking in nature feeds me subconsciously.
I love drawing and I’m drawn to figurative work, live models and portraits. I’m more interested in drawing something real, something as it truly is. But when I paint or make collages, I lean more towards geometric and abstract forms — although one must always hold a real reference in mind. I would define my work as pure minimalism and colourful, on the borderline between figuration and abstraction.
I don’t have strict daily routines, but I listen to an inner impulse to make the physical effort to turn a desire, a feeling, or a memory of something beautiful seen and remembered into an image — with the hope of capturing it on a flat surface with forms and colours. But perhaps something completely different or new will take me to unexpected places. This can spark a struggle, creating failures that must be discarded. Letting go in this way is when I learn new ways of working.
Shapes and colours move, expand, or calm down during a struggle for supremacy to define their borders on the battlefield of the canvas. When the struggle ends, the image is finished — apart from small adjustments I might make — and nothing feels uncomfortable.
The most exciting part is not knowing exactly where intuition comes from — perhaps a step forward, or a step back into something more conventional, which is always less unsettling.
There’s always a point where the image stops! To be sure it’s finished, I turn it to face the wall for a few weeks. After that, I usually see it clearly — either I continue, discard it, or sign it happily.
For me, the strongest visual attraction is colour. But for a few years I enjoyed the purity of black and white (used as an extreme of maximum colour). Besides painting, I draw from live models and make collages.
"The gaze takes possession of a small space of the surrounding nature. The brain processes this encounter. The painter’s hand responds to that code — a vision of the mysticism of that space — with the learned language of line, form, colour, numbers, and geometries, making visible the tremor of the soul…"
