Andrew Holmes

Andrew Holmes is Britain‘s leading Super-realist artist. For three decades he has been working on a 100-picture series called Gas Tank City. It records the storage tanks, trucks and trailers of the highways of the West Coast desert and that artificial urban oasis, Los Angeles, which Holmes has visited annually since he was a student. These, says Holmes, have replaced such traditional buildings as the barn and have, in some ways, become architecture. But it is also to put too architectural a gloss on his work which is sheerly beautiful.
There is something clearly obsessive and certainly astonishing about the way he executes his paintings, most of them containing reflections and shiny chrome, in Derwent coloured pencils with only the skies air-brushed in at the beginning. Holmes says disarmingly he is more comfortable working with pencil than slow-drying paint and he works from 35mm slides which he checks out using a jeweller’s loupe because it enables him to see into the shadows better than with a print. All this could be just elaborate photographic realism. But this is SuperRealism. Holmes has an instinct for strangeness in apparent banality and an instinct for stunning beauty.