From 19 May until 12 June 2017, The Minster Gallery in Winchester will be showing a selection of new paintings by Andy Waite.

This exhibition is Andy Waite’s second solo exhibition with The Minster Gallery and we are delighted to welcome him back to Winchester.

For Andy, painting is an intensely personal activity that he feels compelled to do. He studies the landscape and the weather not just because they are things of wonder and beauty, but because they reflect his own wandering moods, be they light or dark. He creates the work primarily for himself to free these feelings, and when a painting feels right then he feels at one.

I think that painting is also a way to have somewhere other to go in a world full of distractions and chatter. We live with an overload of information and communication, and while those can be good or useful things, the need to divulge our every waking thought and action has reached extreme levels and one is led to ask, where is the quiet and the inner reflection? Painting gives me this.

Andy’s paintings result from a combination of swiftly made sketches in the field, and photographs from which he also makes drawings. He may then focus on one area of the drawing that excites in terms of colour and form and produces a painting from that. From the drawing a painting will begin to emerge, sometimes changing in mood or composition, but always with a sense that in time, something will appear that resonates. Although based on real places, the paintings are becoming, increasingly, landscapes of the soul.

This collection portrays all the drama and intensity we would expect from Andy’s work. Vast skies, a broad spectrum of palette and moods, bravely and loosely applied to canvas or board, large and small.

What attracts us most about his work is that the images seep into the consciousness slowly, they aren't obvious, and slowly you get an impression, but not the whole story straight away. We are intrigued and moved and given a deeper perception of what it is to be human.