'I'm not trying to reproduce a landscape as I see it. I'm interested in what remains when a place has been reduced to its essential forms, colours and rhythms - the things that stay with you after the moment itself has passed.'
Andrew Bird's paintings begin with landscape but are not landscapes in the conventional sense. They are distillations of experience - compositions in which the recognisable elements of a place are reduced, rearranged and transformed through colour, gesture and repeated working of the surface.
Bird is particularly interested in the moment when observation gives way to memory. He makes sketches and gathers visual information in the landscape, but the finished paintings are developed in the studio through recollection and instinct. This allows him to move away from the constraints of a particular viewpoint and towards something more expressive: an image that captures the character of a place rather than simply describing it.
Cornwall provides one of his richest sources of material. Bird often takes to the water in a small boat, using the sea as a vantage point from which to look back at the land. Seen from this position, the landscape becomes a network of unexpected relationships - fields become geometric patterns, the coastline becomes a sweeping line, paths and harbour structures become graphic forms, and the remnants of human activity emerge from the landscape.
This way of looking is central to the paintings. Bird is not attempting to reproduce what he sees. Instead, he simplifies and reorganises it, allowing the original landscape to become a vocabulary of shapes, colours and marks.
The physical process of painting is equally important. Bird works in acrylic, building up numerous layers before scraping and scratching into the surface and reworking areas of the composition. Earlier colours and marks remain partially visible beneath later passages, giving the paintings a sense of depth and accumulated history. The process is one of both construction and reduction: paint is added, removed, exposed and reconsidered until the composition reaches a point of balance.
This gives the finished paintings their characteristic tension. Areas of strong colour and confident mark-making sit alongside quieter passages where earlier layers emerge through the surface. Forms can suggest fields, cliffs, buildings, paths or water without becoming literal representations of them.
There is a clear connection between Bird's graphic design background and this visual economy. Complex landscapes are reduced to essential relationships of line, shape, colour and contrast. Yet the paintings remain rooted in direct experience. They carry the physical sensation of particular places - the movement of the sea, the geometry of the coast, the ruggedness of the Derbyshire landscape - without becoming topographical records.
Bird's paintings can therefore be understood as contemporary landscape abstractions: works in which the natural world is the starting point, but where the final image is shaped equally by memory, imagination and the physical act of painting.
The result is a body of work that rewards both immediate and sustained looking. At first, the paintings offer colour, energy and a strong sense of composition. Gradually, fragments of landscape begin to emerge - a coastline, a field pattern, a harbour, a path or a distant horizon - before dissolving again into the larger abstract structure.