Lower Lake

Hurvin Anderson, Lower Lake, 2005I've been twice now to the Tate's Hurvin Anderson exhibition - a refreshingly cool, air-conditioned experience on these recent hot days, even though many of his landscape paintings depict tropical vegetation and sunlit Caribbean beaches. In her catalogue essay, 'Home and the World: The Britishness of Hurvin Anderson's Diasporic Landscapes', Gillian Forrester lists British painters whose work Anderson admires: 'Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, John Constable, Peter Doig, David Hockney and Euan Uglow, but particularly Andrews. Over time he has absorbed the lessons their methods and preoccupations offer, but his constantly evolving practice is strikingly distinctive and seems unburdened by the freight of both predecessors and contemporaries.' For me the most obvious comparison is with Peter Doig, whose work I've discussed here several times before (including in 2008, when he had a major Tate retrospective). However, as Eddy Frankel…