Lewis Brander included in Financial Times, 21 June 2025

© Lewis Brander. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage. Courtesy of Vardaxoglou Gallery, London

Lewis Brander is included in the article ‘The artists with their heads in the clouds’ by Francesca Gavin, published in Financial Times How To Spend It, 21 June 2025.

“John Constable’s dramatic oils of clouds rolling over Hampstead Heath, of which he completed more than 100, were part of his exploration of the idea that the sky is “the chief organ of sentiment”, as he wrote to a friend. JMW Turner’s paintings of the skies became gradually more expressive as he grew more interested in the luminous quality of sunlight. Gerhard Richter’s paintings of light breaking through cloud, made in the late ’60s and ’70s, follow in the same lineage. 

Today they allow artists to work within the lesser-explored space between abstraction and figuration. Lewis Brander started painting them while living in the Holargos suburb of Athens, from where he would walk and watch the sun set over Hymettus mountain through a haze of smoggy city air. He began to paint sections of sky in shades of rust, turquoise and apricot, with the clouds blurring almost to abstraction.

Having moved back to east London, the area in which his maternal ancestors settled after leaving eastern Europe as refugees in 1921, he has continued to paint the skies; these paintings comprise his forthcoming solo show at Vardaxoglou Gallery in London. “Clouds, for me, are a vehicle to explore abstraction,” he says. “What I love about abstract painting is it goes beyond words. In theory, a Rothko could be hung in a mosque or a synagogue. There are no idols being depicted.”