Andrew Wykes - Hinterlands

Hinterlands, an exhibition of new paintings by Andrew Wykes, opens Saturday, January 23 at Groveland Gallery. A transplant from the United Kingdom, Wykes was born just outside of London and studied fine art at the Epsom School of Art and Design. He received his MFA in painting from American University in Washington, DC, and has taught art for twenty-five years in schools and colleges in England, Belgium and the United States. Currently a painting instructor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Wykes holds the college’s Agnes Hulburd Conger Prize for Excellence in the Humanities for outstanding research. In 2009, he was awarded a fellowship at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Mayo, Ireland. Andrew Wykes also is a recipient of a 2015 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Painted with heavy impasto, Wykes builds his landscapes with a palette knife, introducing rhythmic lines and facets of lively color into his compositions. This contemporary approach to the genre of landscape paintings gives Wykes’ images a unique aesthetic. Rooted strongly in the gesture of drawing, his paintings reveal the energy and diversity of the landscapes to which he has traveled over the past two years. Drawn to quiet, rural locales, Wykes’ new paintings document hinterlands – areas just beyond a coastline or shoreline of a river. In this show, Wykes explores the hinterlands in both Lacken Strand, Mayo, a seaside town in western Ireland, and near his home in Northfield, a small town situated along the Cannon River in southern Minnesota. Of his current paintings, Wykes writes:

I seek to create a balanced dialog between the intellectual and emotional. I paint the geography of where I find myself, in the United States and overseas in Britain and Ireland. These places are eclectic and don’t always have any deep attraction for me, yet there is a bond established through my art-making, which takes place on-site and in the studio. I work with a variety of mediums – oil, acrylic, tempera and collage. However, the goal is always the same: to paint an authentic response to the places I have experienced, and translate that experience from the three-dimensional landscape to the flat surface of my paintings.

            The artist will be present at the opening reception Saturday, January 23 from 2 to 5 pm. The reception and exhibition run concurrently with Open Air, an invitational show of plein air paintings in the Groveland Annex.