We were joined by Andrew at the Eames Fine Art Gallery on the 27 June 2026, there he spoke with Vincent about the works in his joyous exhibition: Dancing with Colour which included his own latest drawings and paintings alongside original woodcuts and carborundum prints by his art hero Gillian Ayres.
The following is a transcript of their talk.
The Influence of Gillian Ayres
Vincent Eames:
Maybe we should start with: Why Gillian Ayres?
Andrew Marr:
Why Gillian Ayres? Very good question. This takes me to a lot of what I want to say today, which is going to be about easy art, difficult art, and the importance of colour.
I just fell in love with the first Gillian Ayres painting I saw, when I was about 17 or 18, passing a gallery - so much so that I tried to learn as much as I could about her work. I've been following her ever since, and I was lucky enough to know her a little bit. She was the most infuriating person to interview for television because she really didn't like talking about her art. Personally, I think Gillian Ayres is the greatest non-representational artist Britain has produced.
I think she's up there in her field with Hockney and other greats, but she's very little known compared to most of them. The reason for that is she never, ever played the game. She didn't make friends with the big London gallerists, she didn't network, and she didn't try to get herself interviewed by the newspapers. When she was pinned down and asked about her work, she always downplayed it in one way or another. It was an extraordinary kind of anti-fame, anti-networking, and anti-money attitude.
All she was interested in was painting, and she would paint very often. She was very much a slightly posh girl of South West London in the 1940s, yet she never lost her Cockney accent. Even while she was in the studio painting she quite often had her hair done, she'd wear a 1950s kind of posh frock, and she very often had her nails done. She would take up the paint in great heaps of gooey paint and slather it on, working it over and over. She used to say, "There's nothing else I do. I only paint. That's all I do all day long."
Like a lot of obsessives, she got better and better until she was producing the later-period work you see here today, which I absolutely adore. There's a simplicity about it that was won from 50 years of hard graft. It's not nearly as easy as it looks. This work particularly, just sings with joy and colour. But she was a very technical painter who was thinking constantly about structure, rhythm, balance, shape, form, and texture in a technical way. The result was works of great beauty and great joyousness.
Ictis, Gillian Ayres
Easy vs. Difficult Art
Andrew Marr:
I think it is very easy to assume that what is not immediately attractive is deep. I'm a great reader, and I'm reading two writers at the moment. One is the poet Adrian Mitchell, who is the simplest possible poet you'll know; all his work is simple, direct, emotional, and means a lot to me. But I'm also reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake for the second or third time—probably the most difficult work of mainstream fiction produced in the 20th century.
The danger with difficult things like that is you decide you like them because you've worked hard on them and invested a lot of time. You don't necessarily really like them, but you want your investment back, so you become a promoter of whatever it is. I think there's a lot of conceptual art and the ‘darker art’ of modern times that operates the same way.
Once you've put the work in, you've invested, you're caught, and so you have to like it. Whereas people who are immediately accessible are slightly downplayed by that intellectual culture.
The obvious example would be Matisse and Picasso. Picasso was the great networker, producing an awful lot of hard, angry, political, and often misogynistic work. Compare that to Matisse, whose work appeared on the surface to be sunny.
Matisse once said, downplaying his own efforts, "I want my paintings to be like sitting down into a wonderful, easy chair." It was a deliberately, provocatively simplistic statement, yet to me, he is by far the greater painter.
In the same way, I think Gillian is an absolutely top-flight, major international artist. Before she died, she was having big exhibitions in the States, in Japan, and around the world, so she was noticed in her lifetime. But she isn't noticed as much as she needs to be now. I do also love her. Original prints and I think they offer a wonderful opportunity to enter the Gillian Ayres market while it's still relatively modest.
Vincent Eames:
That's very true.
Andrew Marr:
Just you wait. She is going to go big, big, big!
Vincent Eames:
And do you think she's underrated at the moment because her works are accessible, joyous, and colourful? Is that part of the problem?
Andrew Marr:
Exactly. It's too easy. It doesn't make you look clever to your friends to like Gillian Ayres. You actually are very shrewd and clever to like her, but it doesn't make you look clever to your intellectual friends!
The Visceral Experience of Art
Vincent Eames:
The way you've talked and written about Gillian's work in the past suggests a visceral sensation. It's not necessarily a purely cerebral engagement, although that is there. It hits you in the chest rather than the head.
Andrew Marr:
I think that's a perfect segue. This fundamental question of what a picture or a work of art actually is, isn't as straightforward as it seems. It is not simply the ink, oil, pencil, or canvas. It’s clearly more than that. I don't think it's even just the work, thought, energy, and sweat the artist put into it. Ultimately, a successful picture is defined by the sense of excitement or energy it generates in the viewer standing next to it.
Vincent is absolutely right; it should hit you in the gut more than the head. Gillian just does that to me again and again. Ultimately, I can't fully explain it, but in front of a Gillian Ayres painting, my heart lifts, I feel better, more energized, and more open to the rest of the world. She opens me up like a corkscrew.
Now, to get a painting to do that takes a lot of work. We're all different and approach it differently. In the collection I have here, there are some darker works, and some that look nothing like Gillian Ayres. But at the back of my mind, I'm always thinking of her ambition to achieve an exciting, unexpected, and daring rhythm and balance. It's like spinning plates or a high-wire act where the painting almost doesn't work.
Blueberry Hill, Gillian Ayres
For instance, with this piece, (Blueberry Hill), there’s lots of great stuff going on around the edges—she's pushing the work right into the edge. If she hadn't chosen to put a very light wash of yellow against a white stripe, it would not work. She makes those high-risk choices all the time, and every single picture of hers is different. She would angrily say, "It's bloody hard work. Why is it such bloody hard work?"
Rest in peace Gillian! She is someone we should all remember, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be doing a show alongside her.
Gillian Ayres’ Telescope VII:25, Andrew Marr
Artistic Process
Vincent Eames:
You've eloquently put together why she's an inspiration to you. I should explain how we put this exhibition together, because this wasn't actually intended as an act of homage. Andrew didn't know these works would be shown alongside Gillian's when he was making them over the last year; we came up with this pairing quite late in the day. You weren't considering that your work would be up next to hers in the gallery, which might have changed things.
Andrew Marr:
It might well have. The biggest difference - apart from the fact that she's a genius and I am not -is that she was a hardcore abstractionist, even though she disliked the word abstract. If you look at the print ‘Song Beneath the Stars’, she spent years denying that flowers, petals, or stars were involved. She'd get quite angry and say, "They're just bloody shapes. They're there because they have to be there because they're bloody shapes." Then later in life, she conceded, "Well, of course, they are bloody stars, aren't they!?"
Song Beneath the Stars, Gillian Ayres
Personally, I have always been most excited by the space where abstraction - a pure interest in colour, shape, and rhythm - meets representation. Gillian would probably regard many of my pictures as not properly abstract, and she'd be right. Whether it's Kandinsky, Paul Klee, or Matisse, I find myself most excited by artists when they are right on the edge of abstraction - where they have pushed and simplified representation so far that they arrive at an almost abstract place.
Vincent Eames:
You've always navigated that space between, and there is a narrative element to it. This is our sixth show with you, and a narrative element is always visible in your titles. Your work acts almost like a visual diary charting the year as you go through it, particularly through your drawings.
Sudden Bird XII:25, Andrew Marr
Andrew Marr:
Yes. To make up for the scarcity of words in my actual diary, I do a drawing almost every day. I'm trying to capture something similar to what Howard Hodgkin described. He said he wasn't trying to paint a conversation going on in the garden, but rather the emotional recollection of that conversation. I find that a very helpful guide.
I walk around all day looking at things, sniffing flowers, looking at trees, and thinking of books I read as a child, and then I try to register the emotional organisation of those experiences. Mostly, it's a relatively joyous process because I'm a pretty sunny person. There are moments when I'm a bit down or challenged, and the pictures will reflect that, but overall they are a system of note-taking through life. The reason for selling them is that they are like postcards—I want to fling them out into the world and onto people's walls.
Jiggery Pokery Dream 1 V:26, Andrew Marr
Texture, Technique, and the Return to Painting
Vincent Eames:
In this show, we have two main walls of your drawings using watercolor, ink, and coloured pencil. Your media has evolved a bit over the last couple of years.
Andrew Marr:
I am very interested in texture. I've been using strongly coloured inks and gouache here. I put water on the paper by itself, draw a shape in gouache, and then drop the ink onto the water. Depending on how much ink I use and how high I drop it from, you get very different textures and gradients of blue.
Another textural technique I've used for years is using the edge of my fingernail or a little knife to cut small marks into the paper. Then, when I run Caran d'Ache coloured pencils across them, the white lines kick out, creating a lovely lithographic feel.
This year, I started using acrylic paint on top of thin gouache, ink, and pencil. But I got a call from Eames saying, "Andrew, we have a slight problem. The acrylic paint is causing the paper to buckle too much; it's unsellable, and you've got to start again." They very kindly sent me some heavy card to show the kind of substrate that could handle a multimedia mix of acrylic, ink, and pencil. I filled those up, and if you look closely, you can see some lovely, thick textures.
From there, I moved on to bigger pieces of board, which you can see in the middle of the room. Those are drawn in pencil and filled in with acrylic and ink. Finally, I moved on to working with acrylic paint and pencils on canvas, so there are pencil marks all over the large canvas paintings as well.
Birdlife IIII:26, Andrew Marr
Vincent Eames:
It's a welcome return to painting after a bit of a hiatus following the closure of your studio, though you're using acrylic now instead of oil.
Andrew Marr:
I gave up my studio because, despite my accent, I am a Scot. Once I started working at LBC virtually every day, I couldn't get into the studio often enough to justify the extreme cost of renting a space in Central London.
Rhythm: What Makes a Picture Good
Vincent Eames:
There is a dancing, musical rhythm to your work that stands out, especially when counterpointed with Gillian Ayres' work. Is that musicality conscious?
Andrew Marr:
I read a book on drawing and painting a while back, and the psychological fundamentals of composition seem quite obvious. Human beings evolved on the plains of the Serengeti where we first became safe by climbing trees to escape predators. Because of this evolutionary history, horizontal lines are inherently reassuring to us, which is why most art utilizes them. Vertical lines, reminiscent of trees, are similarly associated with safety and structure.
Primrose Hill III:26, Andrew Marr
Conversely, diagonal lines are disruptive and create an energy that can drive you forward. You can see Gillian using a lot of diagonals in her small yellow picture. The balance of those competing forces holds the image together: a force thrusting up from the left is met by another from the right, locking the composition right in the centre.
Fiesole, Gillian Ayres
That tension connects directly to dance. Dancing is all about moving your body into a position where you are just about to fall, but you don't. Alongside joy, rhythm, and movement, there is an inherent element of danger in dance. To inject enough energy into a picture's structure, it needs a bit of that high-wire tension.
Vincent Eames:
Is the thought process different when you're creating a painting versus a drawing?
Andrew Marr:
Not very different. Even though the piece over there (Birdlife V:26) is a drawing, its structure is relatively complex. I divided the background into two colours I love—light blue and light green. To divide them, I wanted a curving diagonal to exaggerate the movement, which pushes the entire momentum of the picture upward. To counteract that push and stabilise the piece, I added a pink triangle that weights it back down. This left a large central space where I created a hummingbird-themed flower arrangement. This is all done in pencil with acrylic paint layered across it.
Birdlife V:26, Andrew Marr
Mixing media allows me to achieve details I couldn't manage otherwise. In a standard oil or acrylic painting, you can't easily get very delicate lines, but here I can draw them in pencil and layer bold splodges of acrylic paint over them. It gives me options I wouldn't have in a pure drawing or a conventional canvas.
Vincent Eames:
How formulated is your colour placement when you begin, or does it occur as you go along?
Andrew Marr:
Instructional books will tell you that certain colours naturally pair together, like blue with yellow or orange with green. There is truth to that, but Gillian Ayres was constantly experimenting with unexpected, potentially clashing colour combinations that ultimately worked. You have to rely on instinct.
Vincent Eames:
That harnessing of dangerous, clashing colours that feel like they could collapse at any moment seems to be your primary inheritance from Gillian Ayres.
Andrew Marr:
I think so. A good picture must convey energy to the person looking at it. If you look at a boring, sub-impressionist oil painting of a harbour scene, you don't get any energy back from it. We all walk past hundreds of canvases in galleries because our eyes aren't caught; there's no connection. That happens because we've seen it a hundred times before. Our brains recognize the standard combination of a haystack, a tree, and a floaty cloud, and it fails to spark any new emotional or intellectual electricity.
Finis VIII:25, Andrew Marr
Making a good picture requires being aware of the millions of similar images that came before. If a painting doesn't stem honestly from your own roots, your own emotions, and your own specific moment, the person looking at it isn't going to feel any real excitement.
Andrew Marr and Gillian Ayres: Dancing with Colour is on until the 12th of July at Eames Fine Art Gallery
View the works from the exhibition online
