Andrew Gemmill

Born and educated in England, Andrew Gemmill has been painting since childhood. At school he won numerous art prizes and continued to widen his interest in art, visiting France, Germany, Italy and Spain to see the great galleries of Europe.

After gaining a degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, he studied painting and drawing with Signorina Nerina Simi in Florence, who taught the same methods which had been used by her father, a pupil of a pupil of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century French master Ingres.

Travelling keeps him inspired and he likes to spend some months of the year in England and Europe, as well as having a home in Australia. After retiring from a business career, he owned and ran Gallery 21, Melbourne’s leading watercolour art gallery for several years. He now paints full time and spends a good deal of time teaching watercolour to private pupils and groups. He has had four successful one man shows with Jenny Pihan Fine Art in Melbourne and has exhibited and sold work at the Geedon Gallery in Essex, in England, the Sandy Garvin Gallery and the Chester Gallery in Chester, Connecticut, USA.

He has received many Highly Commended awards and has won many Prizes including several First Prizes for Watercolour at various Art Shows in Victoria. He has also given demonstrations and has run workshops at various art clubs and societies in Victoria, South Australia and in the United Kingdom. In 2007 he took a group on a watercolour workshop/tour to Wales and Tuscany.

In 2006 he was invited to teach watercolour at the American School in Switzerland and at the Botanical Art School of Melbourne, where he has been the only non-botanical art teacher. He is a Member of the Australian Society of Marine Artists, the Victorian Artists Society and the Watercolour Society of Victoria, where he was President for three years.

Andrew’s approach to watercolour is very much the impressionistic approach, although he is hesitant to attach himself to any particular school of painting. Watercolour is so spontaneous a medium that freshness and speed of execution are vitally important to him. His aim is to capture the fresh, vigorous and fleeting moment, in light and colour and energy. He travels a great deal and his work is represented in collections in Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom.