No Idling (Study)

Hurvin Anderson brings a unique perspective to the longstanding traditions of genre, still-life, and landscape painting. Using memories and photographs, he reconstructs places, things, and everyday activities tied both to the Afro-Caribbean community in which he was raised in Handsworth, England, and to the Caribbean Islands themselves, Jamaica especially. Sites are very often confused and transposed in his work. In this way, Anderson’s oeuvre tends to straddle locales and cultures, evoking the experiences of longing and belonging, home and migration, postcolonialism and trans-culturalism.

No Idling (Study) reflects the technical facility for which Anderson is recognized. An independent work of art that also served as the study for a larger painting of the same name, No Idling (Study) is characterized by powerful formal and chromatic effects. Anderson created the work by applying acrylic paint to a sheet of transparent drafting film. Strips of both blue tape and clear tape block out areas of the composition, specifically those transferred to the related painting. The composition reads as a nest of interlocking forms vaguely reminiscent of a grove of trees, each shape defined by brushstrokes of distinct colors, from purple and red to orange, green, and yellow. In many cases, the acrylic paint dripped downwards, following the pull of gravity, leaving rivulets of color.