Michelle Andres
Carmichael, California
Award winning California Painter, Michelle Andres' work is collected nationally and internationally. Find her at 1021 R. St. Sacramento Studio #1 at ARTHOUSE.
MessageMICHELLE ANDRES
Artist Statement
For me, the natural world resets the rhythm in my soul. I’m inspired by the land, the light, the quietude. Throughout our days, we find and cherish moments when we just breathe. I strive to create paintings to give us those moments.
My current work explores our intimate relationship with the natural elements of our rivers, rural expanses and parklands. Working through layers of gooey oil paint, attentive to line, light, texture and colour, I explore my world…our world. The landscape is observed and recorded in a flattened fashion. Several layers of paint chronicle the history of the picture, with little attempt to hide the path. Pieces of paint tell little stories, like the account of the land. Working towards ‘simplification with interest’ is the goal. Details are scrubbed from the work and I present a final, redacted visual composition. This creates space for individual interpretation. There’s no reason to tell the entire story as I urge viewers to remember their own.
Perfection is not a part of the equation. I avoid and distrust perfection. In reality you don’t find perfect trees or people – their imperfections make them real and interesting, so I embrace that narrative. It’s through this process I hope to give observers a quiet, thoughtful respite from our busy, often noisy world - seeing something nourishing they’re familiar with, but didn’t realize they were missing.
Bio
Michelle Andres is a contemporary American oil painter, writer and poet who draws from nature to celebrate joy and hopefulness in our often challenging world. She has worked in abstraction and poetry and currently focuses on landscapes and items of extreme curiosity.
A corporate refugee, Andres has spent a lifetime being driven by her creative nature. A natural artist and writer, her parents encouraged her to pursue a “sensible education” and she found herself working in the shark-tanks of corporate America. Her focus was workplace behaviour and organizational change initiatives. Her full-time art career began, in earnest, in 2012 and has included painting, collage and mosaic. Her early work teased apart the fabric of humanity, including our common flaws, and she found the work a heavy burden.
In 2019 Andres sought a more positive approach. Inspired by the work of Nicholas de Stael, Raimonds Staprans, Stuart Shils and others, she began paying homage to her surroundings in oil landscapes. Having identified a deep human need to celebrate lightness, simplicity and joy, her boyant landscapes are designed to lift the spirits.
Andres has studied with painters such as Katherine Chang-Liu, Heather Wilcoxin, Carl Heyward, Skip Lawrence, Sandy Ostrau, Gage Opdenbrouw, Craig Stephens and draftsman Salvatore Victor. She exhibits in galleries in the Western United States, and her work appears in private and corporate collections throughout the U.S. and abroad.
Statement
ABOUT - Art Writer John Seed
Michelle Andres: Redacted Landscapes by John Seed
Artist Michelle Andres has moved forward in the past year by experimenting with fresh subject matter and a new medium: oil paint. Inspired by a recent move from suburban Carmichael to a home overlooking a protected parkway along the American River, Andres has responded profoundly to her new surroundings. “I’ve been exploring the cadence of life’s natural rhythm, “ Andres comments. “When it is quiet I think we can hear the trees.”
Working with oils—after having previously used acrylic and mixed media to paint abstractly— Andres has become more sensually engaged in her surfaces that now feature pleasing impasto under-painting and broadly applied washes. The varied strokes and textures of her new paintings work against perfectionism, which Andres strives to avoid and move her art towards calm and feeling, both of which she embraces.
Deceptively simple, Andres’ recent landscapes emanate a serenity that she has been seeking. Their firmly organized and straightforward vocabulary of forms—including trees, mountains and planar landscape elements—tell us that Andres is at heart a formalist whose representational work has an abstract scaffolding underneath. Two of Andres’ favorite artists, Nicolas de Staël and Raimonds Staprans, have helped inspire this sense of underlying rigor and harmony.
Andres’ recent canvas “Hiking with Nicholas,” is a prime example of the kinds of formal relationships that the artist is now generating. Featuring a horizon line dotted with trees and a single white dwelling, the composition is divided (and supported) by an arch of simple planar forms. Its range of of colors—grey-greens, blues, tan and pink—form a chromatic bridge that ends with a bold field of deep crimson. Andres’ ability to modulate color harmonies—and to form geometries with them—endow this composition with its distinctive mood. To put it another way, when Andres works representationally her experiences in painting abstractly continue to affect her choices.
Another smaller composition, “A Fine Young Man,” depicts a single leaning tree caressed by the wide brushstrokes of the sky that frames it. Carefully modulated alternations in brushwork—between smoothness and texture—and interplays between the forms of the tree and a range of surrounding hills make the work come alive. Activated by subtleties, like the hint of orange that hovers on its horizon, “A Fine Young Man” is one of Andres’ “redacted landscapes.” By refining and reducing her subjects, Andres calls attention to their essences and rhythms.
With their carefully modulated relationships, Andres’ landscapes are meant to slow you down and draw you in. By working with a carefully selected and cultivated set of elements Andres has committed herself to maximizing her own sensitivity while distancing herself from the “noise” of art world trends. Over time, if she can sustain her personal vision, she has the potential to create a highly original body of work. As that process unfolds, her calm attentiveness will remain her greatest asset. As Andres puts it: “I will continue to work on a painting until I find it interesting, like the history of the land itself. I look for small ‘events’ in paint to satisfy me.”
© John Seed 2019
©2022-2023 Michelle Andres - All Rights Reserved. Images are property of the artist.
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