Andrew Marr | Illuminations | 16 May - 2 June 2024

Eames Fine Art is delighted to welcome Andrew Marr back to the gallery for his fourth solo exhibition with us this spring. Drawing is the bedrock of Marr's artistic practice. He makes a point of drawing every day, producing at least one finely finished piece before he contemplates anything else in his schedule. This exhibition features over 100 new colour pencil and ink drawings, employing experimental mark making techniques as well as large paintings on canvas.

'I am about to be 65 which, in ancient days, was the year of retirement. I do not know what is ahead for me. Work, writing, family, politics, health - all is obscure. There will be light, there will be dark.

But about one thing I am sure, and I am clear: there will be drawing. (I include in that painting, because painting is only bigger and wetter drawing.) Drawing has been beside me, a place of self-explication and emotional refuge, this big, red-faced, stumbling friend, since before I learned to read or catch a ball. It has never left me, a necessary, ceaselessly rattling-on companion.'

- Andrew Marr, May 2024

View and purchase the exhibition catalogue here

'Sometimes people ask me what my drawings or paintings are like, what they are about. I find it curiously hard to answer. I used to use the word abstract, but it doesn’t really work: how can things so dependent on wiry, moving lines, mimicking the lines all around us; and on the saturated colours of the material world, be described as abstract? They are certainly non-representational in the sense that they are not made, ever, in front of an image, depending on the laws of perspective and modelling. Yet they all represent something, from a vague idea in my mind of the barbarian tribal jollity of northern Englishness, and how that relates to modern African art, through to the feeling on the back of the neck on a hot day in southern France suddenly able to see someone I love reading, apparently unobserved.

So, representation: there are lots of stories here, famous old stories and incomprehensible new stories about walking, or making new friends. There are gods and monsters, great mountains and bodies, moons and angels, flower-life and birdlife, days lost and time reclaimed. These have all been made hunched over my desk using fine coloured modern pencils, a couple of bottles of ink, brushes, and part of a wine stopper for punching and gouging.

Taken together, I think they add up to a view of the world which is really quite grand – brighter, sharper, faster moving and more rhythmic than the world can seem at other times. I don’t know what I will be doing next year, next month or even next week – except that I will be drawing, drawing, drawing. It’s the thing.'

- Andrew Marr, May 2024