About
Andy Pye is an Australian artist based in El Dorado, Victoria. Known for his large-scale, expressive landscapes, Pye paints remote and rugged parts of the bush with a focus on light, mood, and presence. His work is held in collections across Australia and internationally, and he is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.
After completing schooling in Geelong, Pye began painting in Melbourne, documenting the alleys and terrace houses of North Fitzroy, Cartlon and was inspired by artists such as Danila Vassilieff. Now based in El Dorado, North East Victoria, Pye works at prolific scale and output into his mid career.
Pye seeks out sites which many would consider ‘inaccessible’, and produces not only a pictorial record of the place, but an experience of the order and chaos, the variable quality of light across seasons, and the character of the landmarks, vegetation and wildlife that inhabit these spaces. In instances, Pye also records the fact that, as ‘inaccessible’ as these spaces may appear, many still show the signs of human presence. But above all, the artist seeks to enliven the sacred in life and art through the Australian landscape. Pye also has also had a multitude of Australian ‘front bar and bush’ poetry published.
Pye’s works are included in several public galleries, and in private and corporate collections across the world. Pye is represented by Leading Australian Gallery Martin Browne Contemporary in Paddington, NSW.
Andy Pye articulates landscape like a writer; his hills and gullies can be literal, oneiric, or literary, but in every scene, he weaves a psychological drama that is richly suggestive of narrative. Pye heads into the bush to clarify his thoughts and to cope with his memories – to find certainty in himself. Perhaps his characters – the boulders and trees – are not so much alive in the spirit in animistic sense, but in the artist’s familiarity with them. The artist comes down from the mountain with a story. A lightning strike, a torrent of water, the tentative epicormic shoots on a blackened stump. At times, we are listening to a pub yarn somewhere deeply immune to pretense. Pye exaggerates the character of trees that are known to him, they’re improbably bent, in hues of lavender, smoke, and cooked-prawn pink and there you will find a vernacular in his brushstroke that toes the line closest to Ocker. We recognise the language – warm, jocular, and boastful, with a rising inflection we learned to rein in. As for his paintings’ scale and ambition, they are unabashedly big leagues. And then there are times when his strokes soar like a Tiepolo-blue sky and rays of light pierce undergrowth like Banville’s gold man, but the grandeur is otherworldly too, outside time – Pye hints at the almost miraculous and transcendent. The landscape defies internal / external categorisation, it’s best approached as a keyhole back into the miraculous.
Andy has a unique visual language in the Australian Art scene, that is one of a kind.
Immersed in the vibrant life, dynamic sounds, and solitude of the Australian bush, Pye effortlessly captures its unique beauty and terror. In doing so, Pye carries the legacy of the pioneering Modernist painters of the Australian bush, those who gave painterly form to our country, such as Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan.