Accompanied by a series of intense images and visual effects, Andrew Holmes uses the subject of the talk, Road Work, to trace his extraordinary career from a young student of architecture in the analogue days of the 1960s to an internationally recognised artist in the present era of the digital image.
He maps the theme of drawing onto the people that have influenced his life; growing up in Bromsgrove, a Midlands town with a unique engineering legacy; his first nationally exhibited watercolour painting aged four; joining the Architectural Association in 1966 with its emphasis on line drawing; travelling to the altogether tougher New York where he was exposed to the disciplines of minimalism; making journeys over many years across the States to California where its natural light generated developments in the use of photography and film.
The lecture also explores themes of music and popular culture and their connections to the brilliant individuals who construct the custom cars, motorcycles and in particular the semi-trailer trucks, which are ever-present in his work.
Andrew Holmes was born in 1947 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, moved to London in 1966 and studied at the Architectural Association. Andrew is an internationally recognised photorealist artist who has made a lifelong contribution to contemporary art. He is best known for a series of 150 realistic pencil drawings exploring the apparently anonymous mobile infrastructure of cities. In addition, his work encompasses printmaking, photography, film, design and radio. The work offers not only the unique quality of handicraft, but the elements of three traditions: that art is evidence of an ability to select significant objects from experience; that art is the residue of engaging existing systems with particular mechanical techniques and processes; that art provides the possibility of fabricating new versions of reality. The work in all its forms has been exhibited and published widely for sixty years.
Andrew was invited to be Visiting Scholar and artist in residence (2007) at The Getty Center, Los Angles, and to contribute to Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, shown in over 60 cultural institutions throughout Southern California. He is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, and Guest Professor at the Technische Universitaat, Berlin. He was an innovative and inspirational Unit Master of the famous Diploma Unit 9 from 1978 to 1996. The work of his students is archived in four books housed in the AA library.
