Statement

My paintings are about looking. Painting for me is the intersection of looking and a sensibility, or as Wallace Stevens put it: “where nature and the imagination meet.” Painting is about how we look out and how we look in. 

I take great joy in the beauty of the visual world, but the way of conveying that joy pictorially for me is a delicate balance of outward and inward looking. I want my paintings to engage the eye and the mind in one preverbal moment. The ways in which the world asserts its hidden rhythms, invisible to the camera, is what I experience every time I turn a corner and a view takes my breath away: that moment is a purely abstract one, which only painting can retrieve even after the act of naming has pulled it apart. Those enlivening, invisible affinities within the visible world contain the deepest mysteries of looking—how a landscape can convey the rhythm of our origins—birth, death, the eternal return—all at once and still be just a meadow and a few buildings. 

Some artists are called to address the pressures of our moment in history directly, and others are called to address them indirectly, but I believe to accurately convey the complexity of my own looking is a form of bearing witness. 

--Mark Andres