Groveland Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of A Likeness, an exhibition of new paintings by Andrew Wykes. A transplant from the United Kingdom, Wykes has exhibited and taught art internationally for over 40 years in the UK, Belgium and the U.S. and holds the title of Emeritus Professor of Painting at Hamline University in St. Paul. In 2021, Wykes appeared on Sky Television’s Landscape Artist of the Year.

Painting with heavy impasto, Wykes builds his landscapes with a palette knife, intermixing drawn elements with thick texture and color. Wykes’ contemporary understanding of the landscape allows him to translate the three-dimensional environment into an abstract space. With an aesthetic sensibility grounded in gestural drawing, his paintings speak to the diverse array of landscapes to which he has traveled. Of this new work, Wykes writes:

“I paint the geography of where I find myself, in the United States or overseas in Britain and Ireland. Naturally, as an immigrant to the United States, my work has developed, but still, the premise is to make a balanced dialogue between the intellectual and emotional. These locales are eclectic and don’t always have any deep affinity for me, yet there can be a metaphysical or poetic bond. The absence of representative details in my work, I hope, grants these paintings an unexpected second life. I am aware of their capacity to suddenly flip to abstraction, for a moment losing their pictorial associations. One is always aware of straddling the line between the timelessness of perception and the task of translation to paint. There are moments of lucidity in which one’s own visual store of past associations opens and causes personal or universal analogies. My work is made on-site and in the studio. The medium I work with varies – oil, acrylic, tempera, and collage – however, the goal is always the same: to make an equivalent and authentic response to the places I have experienced and to then translate that experience of the three-dimensional landscape to the flat surface of my paintings.”