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- I moved directly from London,
which is a city of 12, 15 million people, to Tucson.
So it was a massive transition for me.
It is such an alien environment.
You could be on another planet.
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Good painting requires good drawing,
so I've always been interested in drawing.
I use an old-fashioned technique
which is you take your image
and you draw a grid on the image that you're gonna use.
And then you draw the equivalent grid on your canvas,
and then you by hand draw the image by referring to this.
So you're blowing it up, as it were.
But it's all by eye and it's all by hand.
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That's the starting point of the paintings,
there's exploring three dimensions
within the two dimensional painting plane.
From that, you then introduce color.
I build the painting up in blocks of color,
so it's quite architectural.
It's more like a form of building than painting.
Most of the color in my paintings
is invented and heightened,
and that's what I think affects people's emotions,
because color's very emotive.
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(crowd murmurs)
- I want to welcome you here this evening.
We're celebrating the opening of Mid-century Perspectives,
paintings by Andy Burgess and objects of modern design.
So Andy, you want to come up here?
So you gotta be in front here.
(audience applauds)
- Julie just told me to put the beer down.
(laughs)
- He's a really shy guy, if you haven't noticed.
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TMA's been doing Free First Thursday for many years
and this is a first for us for Free First Thursday
because we're actually now opening up
community-based exhibitions
in conjunction with this great program.
- Well, this is a really exciting night.
We've long had a very strong focus on art from the region
but because we've reconfigured
where our exhibitions are held,
the way the layout of the museum is,
it appears that we're highlighting them, we always have.
- That was a really nice mini-retrospective
of the type of subject matter
that I've approached in the last 10 years.
When I was at college and I really got into painting,
I really wanted to be an abstract painter.
I was very interested in post-war abstraction,
American abstraction and British abstraction,
obviously famous artists like Pollock and Rothko.
After a while I just painted myself into a corner
and I needed to paint something
that was out in the real world.
Abstract art, modern art, and modern architecture.
Modern architecture's essentially very abstract.
It's planes, receding planes, flat planes and lines.
Steel beams, glass windows and doors.
It appeals to me on an abstract level.
I often get asked, "Were you an architect?
"Are you an architect?"
And I always have to say, "No, I'm just a painter,
"I just like architecture."
- It was such an attraction to his work
because people could see the links to art history
and he's also a fine technical painter and draftsman.
But then when he moved to America,
just like when Hockney moved to LA,
there was this sense of excitement with the light
and with the weather and with
the feeling of color.
And the feeling of actually modernity as well.
- In a way it's the great modern vernacular,
architecture of America
was the way mid-century architecture flourished.
- From the 50s and 60s,
when you had a major surge in the city,
you saw a very large rise
and a very distinct sense of architecture
that was happening here.
And that's something that needs
to be preserved and presented and also celebrated.
And this is one way that we can celebrate that
through this specific artist.
- The Tucson light here,
the really intense sunlight, really works for me.
I like that because that lends itself to abstraction.
When you have really strong forms of bright and dark
that becomes very graphic in itself.
- [Julie] I find it really fascinating
that he comes from London
where all the light and the sky and the colors are subdued
and he's really found his home here in the south-west
because you can see it through his art.
- Andy's kind of the new Tucson.
There's this global approach
but this really strong sense of regionalism.
And you see that in Andy's work.
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- He has an international reputation.
We're really fortunate to have him here in our midst
but another thing that I really like about Andy and his work
is that he really is a part
of the fabric of our community.
- I want to be a part of a community here.
As an artist, I'm interested in poetry,
I'm interested in music, I'm interested in theater.
It all feeds into what it means to be an artist.
You have to be aware
of what's going on culturally around you
so we're very lucky in Tucson.
- I think he's extremely happy here,
so I don't think there's any chance
we're gonna get him back to London full-time.
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