Endless booze and existential gloom. That’s what fuelled the School of London, the post-war movement that counted Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud among its ranks. And the relatively little-known Michael Andrews was associated with them too. But although Andrews painted portraits and Soho drinking scenes in his early years just like Bacon and Freud, it's when he turned his attentions to the more prosaic subject of landscapes that he really came into his own.
There’s a strong feeling of the elemental in this rare little collection of work. Paintings like the shadow of a hot air balloon on a beach remind us the landscape is constantly changed by light and weather. Andrews’s style is a trade-off between expressionism and exactitude: splashes and stains versus sharp-edged detail. This is perfectly balanced in the Thames Estuary scenes he painted in the years before his death in 1995, where you can practically smell the muck and silt of the river’s banks. Sometimes the subject matter gets in the way of his skill. Pictures of telephone boxes on country lanes and deer on Scottish fells can’t escape their biscuit-box associations; scenes of tropical fish in the ocean feel a bit analogue in the era of HD ‘Blue Planet’ documentaries.
Andrews is unlikely to get the Tate retrospective treatment like Bacon and Freud any time soon. His work is too even-tempered; it has none of their angsty drama. But that's okay. Sometimes art can say big things about life, death, the universe and suchlike. Other times it can say things like this: if you apply acrylic paint to a canvas with a spray gun, you can capture the haze and heat of the Australian outback in a really, really neat way. Who needs drama the whole time?