Horsham buildings come alive thanks to creative artist Andrew Roberts

Buildings change – they may look static, but they change daily and everyone’s reaction to a building is different.
The Anchor Hotel, painted by Andrew RobertsThe Anchor Hotel, painted by Andrew Roberts
The Anchor Hotel, painted by Andrew Roberts

The humble bakery, a shop where you might one day buy bread, buy a treat, meet a friend, order a cake for a big ceremony – each time the building has changed its function to you.

So when artists draw buildings, although they often give them hard crisp outlines, perhaps they should actually blur them and make the lines more free flowing.

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This is what the talented and creative artist Andrew Roberts has done to his pictures of the much loved buildings of Horsham, featuring in his one man exhibition ‘In All Its Glory!’ at Horsham District Council’s Horsham Museum and Art Gallery.

In doing that he actually makes the buildings come alive, reflecting the dynamics of how we use them and how they change.

Andrew first came to the Museum’s attention when he painted three scenes of West Street as part of the West Street events in 2013.

However, others may know of him through his stint at teaching at Forest Adult Education or as part of the 2x4 Arts Group based at the Drill Hall. Since those days 15 years ago, Andrew has flourished and developed as an artist exhibiting in New York, Paris and Battersea as part of the celebrated Affordable Art Fairs, while also being part of the Summer show at The Royal Academy in 2011.

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These are just a few highlights in a long career of exhibitions at galleries throughout the length and breadth of Britain, including Mall Galleries London, for both the RBA and Discerning eye exhibitions, Chelsea Arts Society and, most recently, showing at the Royal College of Art NOA winter exhibition.

Having undertaken his training at universities during a time when painting wasn’t celebrated Andrew has a passion and a belief that art is still about colour, movement but mostly a sense of living.

Always working in oils, his views of the Sussex and French landscapes, of the deep azure blue seas of the remembered holiday, to fantastic silver leafed trees that have just caught the breeze.

In order to reflect the sense of being living works, Andrew paints in the field, experiencing what makes the scene real.

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So the exhibition will include oils he has done of Horsham town and it will probably be the only exhibition where you will see the Old Town Hall encased in scaffolding and tarpaulin. But this was a real scene, real life captured in oil.

In All its Glory! is a fantastic opportunity to acquire work by this leading Sussex based artist, whose passion for painting comes across in his work.

The exhibition is open until January 9, 2016. Admission is free.

To find out more about this exhibition, or to see what else Horsham Museum has to offer, visit www.horshammuseum.org.