Karim Farhat in Conversation with Andrew McIntosh
Andrew McIntosh’s paintings feel alive without depicting any life form at all. His solo exhibition I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon presents colossal mountain landscapes drenched in deep reds and interrupted by glowing celestial forms. We met Andrew at School Gallery in Folkestone during the opening of the exhibition, where he guided us through the paintings before the gallery slowly filled with visitors.
Andrew McIntosh, Don’t Leave it out Yonder, 2026. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Andrew Mcintosh: This body of work began after I read a ghost story about Kanchenjunga. I became obsessed with mountains and mountain folklore. I started making these quick landscapes, covering the surface with paint and wiping them back until the original painting began to reveal itself. I liked the idea of taking an innocuous part of the landscape and turning it into something with a sense of power or energy or spirituality… alien presence, whatever it is.
As the gallery filled with visitors, Andrew paused mid-conversation and suggested we continue elsewhere. Across the street, inside a small bookshop, we sat down to begin the interview.
Andrew McIntosh, The Kid (now “the man”) Drifts, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Karim Farhat: Your exhibition title I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon feels like a message being sent into the distance. Who or what is that transmission meant for?
AM: It's meant to be ambiguous, I would say. It's meant to be a message to not really anybody. It's from a song, which is about a lost love, but that's not what it represents for me. I just thought it was a really interesting way to offer the subject.
The song is called Transmission for Jehn and it's got Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 in the background. In the spoken word voiceover, Tierney Malone explores all these planets, in search of this lost love.
Andrew McIntosh, Wanders West, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.
KF: What led you to that shift into the colour red?
AM: I was telling Michael Hall (Director of School Gallery) about my love for the book Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian is extremely violent, but it's so beautiful. So maybe the redness came from that book.
I came up with my Abandoned Dollhouses theme in 2014, and everything since then has just been moving that idea slightly forward. I think the usage of red has come to its total point where it's like, I don't think I can extend the red anymore, it's quite an extreme sort of vision.
But yeah, my work all stems from an early theme which was tricky to come up with. That was something I was very proud of.
Exhibition view; I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon, 2026. Photo courtesy of the artist.
KF: There's an absence of humans in your paintings, but it still doesn't feel like they're completely uninhabited.
AM: They're long gone. It's a world that they've passed, I think. It's sort of post-apocalyptic, or something like that.
That stems back to when I first started as an artist. I took some landscapes to a gallery in the Highlands of Scotland. The gallerist said, ‘I like your paintings, but they feel lifeless’, and I kind of took that to heart. I thought: Why not just make them really lifeless? Why not remove all humans?
At that point, I was trying to do landscapes that would sell to tourists. And I was like: no, I’ll go the other way, I’ll do something with no life at all.
Initially, I painted some people in them but I didn’t think it looked right. I've got a neighbour at the studio who is a great landscape painter, but he keeps putting a guy with a wheelbarrow in the paintings. And I keep telling him, ‘You f*cked up the painting mate. That was a good painting until you put that f*cking guy with a wheelbarrow in it.’
Yeah, we’ll have a laugh I’ll go, ‘Here you go, again, you've got a nice painting and I bet you're going to put a man crossing his arms staring into the distance.’ He's like, ‘Well, I was going to put a man there.’ I’m like, ‘I knew it…’
Andrew McIntosh, Formation of the Gang, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.
KF: Do you maybe see the painting as a transmission itself to the viewer?
AM: My favourite transmission was when a little kid saw my painting and went up asking his dad how I managed to make the light glow so brightly. I just like that this little kid went home with his idea of art changed, even just a little bit, he might have thought: How did he do that? How did he make it glow? Just that little question.
KF: Do you always listen to music while painting?
AM: More audiobooks. Yeah, or podcasts. Usually I’ll be working on two different paintings at once, so I'll do an hour of painting with a podcast and an hour of painting with an audiobook. By the time I finish the hour I'll be itching to get back to the other. It's just whatever incentivizes you to keep going, because it could be quite difficult to keep getting up and paint.
I'd say music is major for so many artists, because it gives us comfort, and audiobooks as well. But I'd say 80% of the time I have no idea what's happened, I'd have to go back and start again.
Andrew McIntosh, Encounters with Natives, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Halfway through the interview, Andrew stood up and reached for a book from one of the shelves surrounding us. A few customers had entered the shop looking for horror recommendations.
AM: Excuse me. I did that so they wouldn’t walk by us while recording.
Exhibition view; I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon, 2026. Photo courtesy of the artist.
KF: How did you come up with the titles of the pieces for this exhibition?
AM: The titles come from Blood Meridian; at the start of every chapter it’s got all these subtitles describing what’s about to happen. All the titles in the show are taken from those.
KF: If someone were to enter one of your landscapes, what do you think they would encounter?
AM: Possibilities.
Outside the bookshop window, visitors were still drifting between the glowing red landscapes across the street.
Andrew McIntosh, Wandering Aftermath, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.
I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon is showing at School Gallery until 30 May 2026.
Karim Farhat
Interviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED