Observation Notation ― A Selection of the Critical Writings of Andrew Forge: 1955?002

Andrew Forge was an English painter and a teacher of painting (Yale University 1975–1994), renowned and respected on both sides of the Atlantic. But he was also known for his writing on the arts, spanning almost fifty years, which was admired for the delicacy and openness of his language and the ways in which he thought about the processes of perception in all their sensual possibilities. The selection here of his writings is intended to show the range of his interests and the particularly personal interpretations he brought to all he saw in an art with which he was so passionately engaged. It is also a fascinating record of the arts that were of concern in the years he wrote, from the work of Rubens to that of Rauschenberg and Frankenthaler, as well as, especially in his last essays, the work of his many friends and associates: Kenneth Martin, Euan Uglow, Jake Berthot, William Bailey, and Graham Nickson.

Andrew Forge was born in Hastingleigh, Kent, England in 1923. His interest in the arts showed itself early, but the war interrupted his studies and it was not until 1947 that he entered the painting program at the Camberwell School of Art in South London, studying under William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, and Kenneth Martin. From 1950 to 1964 he taught painting and drawing at the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College, London and from 1964 to 1970 he was Head of the Department of Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London. From 1975 to 1983 he was Dean at the Yale School of Art, teaching there untill his retirement in 1994. He died in Washington Depot, Connecticut in 2002. He is represented by the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York.