upside down Andrew Lenaghan
I ran into Andy painting Plein Aire at the Gowanus Canal. I hadn’t seen him in a few years and we stood out in the sun talking about the Art World and how it won’t cut a sucker an even break. He’s been making these elaborately detailed industrial scenes in the difficult and demanding open air method for as long as I’ve known him (must be going on fifteen years now)… It’s an approach that one associates more with the last turn of the century and the birth of modernity in French painting…so it’s sort of interesting to see it done during this turn of the century in the U.S. At some level, it seems out of place and he was saying how the critics won’t cut him a break because they’ve annointed one pleine aire guy (whose name escapes me) and that’s all they’ll bother to review, but despite that there seems to be a little Gowanus School developing of people painting these amazing “Valley of Ashes” views before it all turns to Condos and “quaint” waterside developement. It’s interesting how a “historical” technique puts an image into a historical context and so you can’t help but think of those early impressionist paintings with the smoke stacks in the distance beginning the industrial revolution and now Andy out there painting the end and decay of it. He’s got his funky bicycle with a trailer attached full of easel and paints and his beat up walkman and his paint covered clothes and his twisted, tan smile like some sort of anachronism, industrially documenting an American anachronism: Industry.
I told Andy he needs a gimmick… maybe he should go paint smoke stacks in China…. call it: “Complicated Air”.
Check out his work at George Adams Gallery