Female Narrator He may have been known for his party scenes, but Michael Andrews most often depicted landscapes.
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This work is the third in his series of The Estuary of the River Thames. Getty Curator Julian Brooks.
Julian Brooks The whole picture has these amazing tidal effects, like literally seeing the movement of water on the canvas in front of you. And he experimented with different ways of getting those effects.
He poured paint, or turpentine, onto the canvas and moved it around with a hairdryer. The canvas, obviously, laid horizontally. And he would just move the paint or the turps like it was tides. And he took sand and ash and rubbed them into the canvas, mixed them in. And that gives it this incredibly granular texture that you see.
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Female Narrator You'll see he also includes a few figures and several docked boats, which he transposed from an 1894 photograph.
Julian Brooks Andrews loved clipping these images from history into his paintings for effect. If you look closely, for instance, you'll see the figure standing on the pier is wearing a bowler hat. So he's not contemporary. And it adds that air of mystery and intrigue to the whole proceedings. You know, what is the boatman doing there?
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The landscape is what interested him, and yet it's always populated with these tiny figures ... the sense of humankind being small and insignificant amidst the power and eternity of nature.
Female Narrator The painting may reflect his thoughts about mortality, or his questioning of human existence. Andrews worked on this series while undergoing treatment for stomach cancer. He postponed chemotherapy so he could finish this painting. It was his last work. He died a few months after completing it.
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