Actrice nue Painting by Andy Hudson

Andy HUDSON, British artist living in France, and a painter for 60 years, I received my formal education at an art college in England in the 1960s.  I have now been permanently resident in France for 20 years.

These days all my painting is done in oil on canvas, although in the past I also worked in gouache on watercolour paper.  Subject-matter mainly covers portraits and back views (vue de dos) of women, but also landscapes, some of which are of industrial and/or urban subjects.  I continue to do life study, this mainly in pencil on high-quality cartridge paper.

Over the years I have organised groups of painters to go out "en plein air" and confront subject-matter directly:  also to direct classes in life study.  From time-to-time I have been invited to give presentations on various aspects of painting to schoolchildren and to adult art groups, both in England and in France.

Some years ago I provided a number of articles on drawing and painting portraits for the British art magazine Leisure Painter.

The En Plein Air group has not existed for many years now (June 2023, as I write), but I run 2 other groups of artists:  my own painting group - Les Artistes de l'Atelier Violet-Bleu - meetings once a week in a studio in the Cloisters in La Rochefoucauld.  I also run a life class that meets once every 3 weeks at a studio near Feuillade.

Profile: Andy Hudson, artist - painter - portraitist - author
Born Andrew Leonard Hudson in Chatham, Kent in 1946, I spent my youth in Kent and the bulk of my adult life in Wiltshire. After grammar school I trained as an artist then at a college of education, where I met the woman who was to become my wife. Unable to secure a teaching post on leaving college, I found work in the computer industry, where I remained for over twenty years till made redundant during the downturn of the early 1990s: then when desperate for work, in various call centres, before ending up in the vehicle leasing business.

During all this time I continued to paint and to hold one-man shows as well as participating in a number of prestige events with fellow artists at, among other venues, the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and the Mall Galleries in London. I have come late in life to the business of writing, and the gestation of my book on painting, “The ham-fisted artist, or How not to paint”, was long and arduous. “Memoir of a moment in time”, was my first novel, and was written under the pseudonym Xavier Andyl, as are my short stories. I have various other projects in hand, including a series of essays on the work of other artists, looking at their work through eyes different from those of the conventional critic.

Now divorced and living alone in the Nouvelle Aquitaine (formerly Poitou-Charentes) region of France, I have three adult children and a grandson.

A painter for 60 years, I have exhibited extensively both with art groups and in one-man shows, and have works in collections in Britain, France, Holland, Canada, the USA and Australia.

• Nationality: UNITED KINGDOM
• Date of birth : 1946
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary British Artists