An Interview with Alastair Gordon

London-based artist Alastair Gordon and professor Jonathan Anderson discuss the thought behind Gordon's art work.

Alastair Gordon is a Scottish born artist based in London. He lectures at universities and art schools across the UK. Gordon is also the co-founder of the Morphe Arts Trust and writes for various publications on contemporary painting and the place of faith in art. Gordon is the author of the recent publication GOD ART: Signs of Faith in Contemporary Art, a five-year investigation into the place of belief in contemporary art.

Central to Alastair’s artistic practice is the notion of a painting as a cultural artefact. Notions of authenticity lie at the heart of his enquiry, and questions of the replication of imagery, the craft of the artist and the certainty of the viewer are all issues raised in his paintings. In his detailed paintings, artist’s materials such as masking tape and paper are rendered in paint to appear as taped or pinned on a wooden surface, a practice that refers to a specific form of illusionism that proliferated in 17th century Northern Europe called quodlibet (what you will).
http://www.alastairjohngordon.com/

Jonathan Anderson is an artist, art critic, and associate professor of art at Biola University, where he has been teaching since 2006. His research and writing focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in exploring its relations to religion and theology. He has contributed to several books and journals, and most recently is the coauthor with theologian William Dyrness of the book Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (IVP Academic, 2016), which received the 2017 Book of the Year Award of Merit in Culture & the Arts from Christianity Today and was named one of the Top Ten books of 2016 by Image journal.
http://jonathan-anderson.com/