Andrew Johnstone was born in 1933. He was educated at Strasbourg University, Oxford University and the Ruskin School of Drawing. He served in the Foreign Service from 1956 to 1973, mainly in the Middle and Far East, but continued to paint wherever he was. He took early retirement in 1973 and moved to Cornwall. Andrew Johnstone's recent sculpture has been inspired by the Queen of Sheba and her South Arabian Kingdom, and by his friendship with Sherif Hussein, descendant of the Prophet, and ruler of Baihan, when he was in Aden in the late 1950s. Baihan, in what is now the Yemen, covered some of the territory on the southern rim of the Empty Quarter once ruled by the Queen of Sheba. She probably lived about 1000 BC, and nothing remains of her cities and palaces. However, a later culture, the Himyaritic, existed there in the centuries before Christ and left many substantial remains, some architectural and some, mainly alabaster, sculpture. Andrew Johnstone has used imagery from there, and also imagery from the Egytian Book of The Dead, for his celebebration of Sheba. Even though they are not of Sheba's time, it is his evocation of the Queen, and especially of her journey over the desert to Jerusalem, which has inspired him.
Many of his paintings follow on from this work and are inspired either by Arabia or by memories of other places he has served in or been to - but mostly without being specific in their allusion. They are a sort of retrospective and universal travelogue. Another recent source has been the Iliad, and particulary Christoper Logue's wonderful and powerful poetic re-telling of the story in War Music and Kings.
Since 1994, Andrew's work has been shown regularly at the British Art Fairs (Royal College of Art and Commonwealth Institute), London Contemporary (Islington), the New York Art Fair and at one-man exhibitions in Cork Street and Chelsea.
All sizes are overall including frame.
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Iliad 717 | mixed media on board | 665 x 705mm | £2800 |
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Iliad 719 | mixed media on board | 610 x 400mm | £1800 |
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Iliad 824 | mixed media on board | 650 x 600mm | £2600 |
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Iliad 834 | mixed media on board | 605 x 650mm | £2600 |
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I love London 2006 1021 | 735 x 815mm | £5400 | |
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I love London 2006 1022 | 735 x 815mm | £5400 | |
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I love London 2006 1011 | 810 x 910mm | £5600 | |
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I love London 2006 1017 | 810 x 910mm | £2400 |