At twenty-two, painter Isaac Andrews has created works for the likes of Miu Miu and Nike, had a piece commissioned by Tate Collective and sold prints in aid of organisations including Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Mind Charity. His paintings speak to a universal human existence as he denies them a specific context, instead offering the viewer space to add their own perspective. 

This week marks the opening of Love Letters, Andrews’ biggest solo show to date. An exploration of all forms of relationships, the exhibition navigates themes of intimacy, memory and connection through use of negative space and washes of sepia. His split-canvas works pair familial scenes with close-ups of flowers or hands touching: snapshots intended to articulate the mood of his figures and ground them in a moment of stillness.

Rosie Lowit: Love Letters is your biggest solo show to date. Could you tell us about the body of work in this exhibition?
Isaac Andrews: With this exhibition, I wanted to zoom in a little bit. I’ve been looking at relationships for a while but I really wanted to focus and hone in on these moments of touch and intimacy. The show is about all forms of relationships: familial, platonic and romantic, of course. My works tend to look at the idealistic moments within these. I always say that the context is kind of irrelevant; you don’t really need to know the story behind the works, the focus is more so on the feeling.

RL: This idea of context being irrelevant is really interesting, and I’ve read that you intend your figures to be ambiguous in order to speak a kind of universal language. Despite this, do you find yourself imbuing your own perceptions or lived experience onto your paintings?
IA: I try to remove context as much as possible, but I do think it’s inevitable; I can’t ever fully take myself and my own experience out of my paintings, even down to the choices in composition. I think it all comes from somewhere, even subconsciously at times. When I choose to paint a child and mother, that scene will always be imbued with a sense of love and tenderness that comes from my own lived experience of being held by my mum at that age. My paintings are supposed to be open-ended and ambiguous, so the figures could be anyone and people can place themselves within the scenes. They are definitely informed by my own experience, my relationships, by people in my own life, but less so in appearance.

“…I really wanted to focus and hone in on these moments of touch and intimacy.”

RL: And do you take initial photographs or are these scenes imagined? What’s your point of reference?
IA: It’s a mixture. I collate found imagery and my own photos, but a lot of it is just from my imagination as well. Sometimes it will be something as simple as a line in a book or a film, or an image I find in a magazine. Often it’s little things I’ll see, walking around or cycling to my studio. I’ll make a mental note of the way someone is standing, or how two people are interacting, and that will lead to a painting. One of the biggest works in the show is a split conversation, so one panel is three lilies and the other side is a mum kissing her son. I was cycling to the studio a couple months ago, and I saw a kid sitting on his mum’s lap and she was holding his head – I thought it was such a beautiful moment.

“I’ll make a mental note of the way someone is standing, or how two people are interacting, and that will lead to a painting.”

RL: Are these split scenes two separate canvases, or one that’s divided? What’s the thought process for these?
IA: It’s one canvas. Initially I was going to do two separate canvases hung next to each other, but then I tried that out and they felt a bit too separate. My thinking was about having the same feeling in both panels, so I’ll have a figurative scene paired with flowers or two hands touching. Both scenes feel like they have the same – for lack of a better word – vibe, I guess. My view was that these flowers or hands help to articulate the feeling of the main panel, and focus on the softness, closeness, intimacy or the serendipity of this moment. And the stillness, because often they’re scenes that would be quite dynamic, but zooming in on this moment of touch really helps cement them.

RL: Flowers are a repeated motif in a lot of your more recent works. I’d love to know about their significance.
IA: I’ve been making quite a lot of works about relationships in the past year and a half, and from that I began these flower works. I was cycling to the studio on Valentine’s Day and seeing people walking around with flowers, and I noticed that this changed how they carried themselves, which I thought was quite special. I then read The Gift by Marcel Mauss, and started thinking a lot about the role of gifts within relationships, and the idea of showing affection in that way. I love the idea of a very simple gesture that can mean so much – go so far. It feels like such a human act as well, I think. I read somewhere that we’re the only animal except for squirrels that give flowers to loved ones. That’s a really cute idea, squirrels getting flowers and giving them.

One artist I really love is Jennifer Packer, and she makes these incredible still lifes of flowers, but she refers to them as portraits within themselves and by their own means, which I don’t do in my works. For me it’s more so as if they’re capturing the feeling of these relationships, as if they’re representations of the relationships. I made a triptych of works last year, which aren’t in Love Letters, but they did inform the show quite a lot. It’s three duos of figures hugging with flowers; one is a mother and her daughter, the next is two sisters, and then the third is a man and his partner. The title of it is When You Don’t Have the Words. You can say so much with just a bouquet of flowers. It’s not always a gesture of affection, a lot of times it’s an apology, or a token of pity or gratitude.

RL: You’ve created works for the likes of Miu Miu, Nike and Converse. What does it mean to have your art in dialogue with these brands?
IA: When I was younger, it was such a huge goal of mine to work with a big brand in this way. I saw it as a validation stamp. But I’ve realised in recent years it isn’t that at all. Having said that, it’s still super exciting to me. I think my work operates in a different realm in that world. It’s a completely different audience and different intention. There’s always been a lot of crossover between art and fashion, and that’s something that I’m very open to.

Isaac Andrews: Love Letters opens at The NOHO Gallery and runs 1st – 5th May.