Mannequin -2 Painting by Andy Hudson

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  • Original Artwork Painting, Oil on Canvas
  • Dimensions Dimensions are available on request
  • Categories Figurative
huile sur toile : This painting had a weird gestation. First, I was poverty-stricken at the time: I had no fresh canvas and no money to buy any materials, so I took an old painting I was not that interested in keeping, and painted over it: But as it was too big for my purposes, my idea was to cut it down to size after completing the painting.[...]
huile sur toile :
This painting had a weird gestation. First, I was poverty-stricken at the time: I had no fresh canvas and no money to buy any materials, so I took an old painting I was not that interested in keeping, and painted over it: But as it was too big for my purposes, my idea was to cut it down to size after completing the painting. The reason for this was that my original intention was just to paint the torso, very much in line with the philosophy governing the painting of Mannequin -1. There was to be no head, and no part of the body below the hips: in other words just to concentrate on that part of the body wearing this shimmering garment.
The attention of the viewer is held, not only by the pose, but also by the placement of the figure within the picture plane. She is offset towards the right and her torso and right thigh are pointing right, but her head (thank God I did agree to put it in after all!) is turned very slightly back towards our left, her eyes more so, as she looks past us.

The nightie (if that is what you can call it) was turquoise, with the emphasis towards the green, so it is intriguing that my photos of the progress of the painting tend towards the blue. In the end though, it doesn’t matter too much: the girl is just as beautiful either way, and it is the shimmer in the material that counts rather than any colour it might be transmitting.

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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[...]

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.

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