About
Andrew Payne has a BA in Fine Art and was a postgraduate printmaking student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London where he gained a Higher Diploma in Fine Art. Through his art education he developed a strong interest in the representation of light in landscape painting, particularly the work of the 17th century Dutch landscape painters and artists such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Atkinson Grimshaw.
For many years he made colour photographs of the landscape within walking distance of his house in Bedford in the UK. This is not an exotic landscape: it is the riverside near the centre of an English town. Since 2006 he has made short films that capture the interaction of light with the water in this landscape, or the projection of shadows into his home by sunlight. His interest in landscape paintings eventually led him to create films which take this particular landscape as its subject.
Art today is often something that is consumed rather than contemplated, and the slowness of his films, and their lack of action, people and dialogue, require a level of concentration that some viewers may be unwilling to exercise for any length of time. He tries to captures what is easily overlooked as we walk through or stand still in a landscape.
Writing by the British painter Paul Nash Is relevant to this work. Nash wrote about the unseen landscapes of England in a Country Life magazine article in May 1938: “The landscapes I have in mind are not part of the unseen world in the psychic sense nor are they part of the unconscious they belong to the world that lies Visibly about us they are unseen merely because they are not perceived Only in that way can they be regarded as invisible”. Andrew often explores this idea of the unseen landscape in the form of a film by combining a single image of a landscape with a series of close-up shots of the same landscape.
In his film-making the camera is static, with the only movement occurring within the frame of the film. The films consist of a single moving image, a sequence of single images or combinations of two moving images on a single screen. There are no stories or narratives in his films. The soundtracks of the landscape films come from the landscape in which the films are recorded. The films are between one and five minutes in duration. In addition to his landscape films, he uses time-lapse photography to make single shot films of sunlight and shadows falling on the walls inside his house.
Images from his films have also been included in three books published by the artist’s book publisher SU41P. These books bring together the work of artists in different media responding to the same theme. He is a member of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, an international organisation based in New York, which exhibits and distributes experimental films and new media. In addition to being exhibited in the UK, his films have also been shown internationally: in Europe, the USA, Canada, Mexico, South America, India, Vietnam and Korea.