Andrew Tift - One Day You'll Be Older Too (ART EXHIBITION)

Andrew Tift has been a portrait artist for 20 plus years, figurative realist painter but specialises predominantly in portraits. Tift co-sited with the Leonardo Da Vinci Exhibition at the Winter Gardens (Sunderland). Tift focuses on creating highly detailed, intense realism and objective likeness, 'I seek to convey people in the most understanding, intimate and sympathetic way that I can' http://www.andrewtift.co.uk. Tift's idea for the exhibition was based on a good he was reading - Frannie Flagg 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe', this book is about a story of a woman who visits a car home in Alabama, she becomes friends with an elderly woman there who tells her stories of exuberance and sadness in her childhood. Andrew then visited three care homes in Washington (Sunderland), he wanted local people who had lived in, work in the region. He wanted to make sure he focused on the texture of the person skin, their bone structure, expression, mood, scars, hands, hair, eyes and clothes in a very detailed way, you can see microscopic detail which tells you a lot about the person's identity. He catches raw emotion of what is lost and disappeared to these people, by capturing the expressions on their faces. He wanted to base his project on the older generation due to the lack of care the younger generation have towards them.