The Will To Paint: Recent Works by Dean Andrews
By Leslie Ava Shaw, Curator/Art Historian, New York, NY

Wassily Kandinsky believed that painting could represent the universal, that it could express the intense feelings of the artist and that it could exist without referring to the objective world. This gave license to those who followed especially Jackson Pollock whose search for an inner truth did not die with him. In this period of post-modernism that includes multiculturalism, gender identification, and institutional critique, the idea of making paintings with the intention of expressing the metaphysical continues to assert itself in the work of contemporary artists.

Dean Andrews is one such artist who carries this tradition into the 21st century as a contemporary artist whose practice includes the use of unusual materials and innovative techniques.

Andrews has been making non-objective paintings, that is paintings without discernible images, for the past 20 years. Her most recent works contain bands with veils of color. The paintings are large in scale, sometimes as high as 138 inches and as wide as 104 inches. One such work is Decisive Eye, which is actually made up of three horizontal panels that join to make a vertical painting. Her tongue in cheek title obviously refers to an artist’s ability to make careful choices. In this work, the viewer will experience the full range of the artist’s practice. Blues, ocres, violets blending from thin to opaque, from matte to pearlescent, form streams of colored light as if an opal exploded and filled the wall with luminosity. Beyond the use of reflective, interference and other diverse pigments, her use of industrial glass microspheres is testament to the artist’s savvy in discovering how non-art material may be utilized to augment a desired effect.

The shape of the canvas as well as the scale play significant roles. The paintings’ largeness brings to mind Mark Rothko’s remark that when viewing a small painting, you remain outside the painting, whereas when the scale is enlarged and spreads above and beyond the viewer, the experience is one of envelopment so that you enter the painting. However, Andrews’ paintings are sometimes narrow verticals or horizontals such as Brad’s Pit #1 which is a narrow vertical 84 inches in height and 6-1/2 inches in width.

Pollock once said I feel like I’m in the painting. Andrews isn’t necessarily in the painting, but she appears to be of it because the tallness of the verticals may be a conscious or unconscious reference to her own sleek physique. Moreover, by virtue of its width, the painting becomes an object and its optical effect changes depending on the size of the wall on which it is placed. In this context, the work has a relationship to the wall where the wall becomes the background of the painting as in the work of Ellsworth Kelly whose paintings force the viewer to focus on the depth of color. In Andrews’ works of this type, color is also key. For example, in Brad’s Pit #3 the narrow vertical panel is saturated with fiery red and orange hues as if the impact needs to be contained lest these colored bands explode.

Andrews once again plays with established vocabularies albeit to her own liking. For example, the bands in Monumental Mystique are reminders of Barnett Newman’s zip paintings, only her “zips” are drenched with fresh, brushy combinations of color.

Randomness and order, both essential elements of nature, are combined in these recent works. For example, Mind Over Matter is a narrow panel containing stacked modules of transparent layers of color. These measured wide bands contain streams, waves and clouds of color that are organically rendered. These stacked sequences represent order. The cloud-like gestures of pink and gray separated from sections of puffs of cerulean blue and orange are evocative of nature’s indeterminate quality.

Suggestive of a sun-filled morning or an evening following a glorious sunset, nature is frequently called to mind, though subtly. In order to glean meaning from these canvases, one must be willing to contemplate the sheer beauty of their surfaces. One may experience these paintings as reminiscent of bathing in the sun’s nurturing light or embracing the night sky’s awesome constellations of sparkling lights against the vast darkness. But these paintings are not the sky nor do they represent it. In this respect, Andrews pays homage to Agnes Martin whose paintings of the last 30 years are minimalist abstractions that were created to take pleasure in the mere beauty of color and lines of graphite that are hand-drawn, yet contemplating them is similar to scanning the sky or looking into the ocean.

There are two camps of abstract art, one is abstraction as representing a realm that is larger than life, the other is the focus on the formal aspects of color, line, shape, and texture. Before abstract painting came into its own in the early 20th century, the Impressionist artists brought painting into the field of process. Their use of pigment directly from the tube, the mixing of colors on the canvas, and the application of patches of paint combined to make paintings that were a more immediate and spontaneous response to nature. However, if an artist is not painting from nature, that is from observed reality, the question remains, what is her intention?

In the late 20th century, Robert Ryman said, “there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The final object is what the viewer witnesses, but the making is the experience of the artist’s alone. What motivates an artist to spend hours preparing and making the art only perhaps to begin again the next day because the final result is not what one had anticipated? It is the act of painting itself that motivates the maker. It is the joy of process that has come after years of practice, of experimenting with pigments and materials, with scale, shape and so on. It is a result of years of struggle. The beauty of creating abstract painting of this type, painterly, gestural and minimal yet contained within the parameters of a wide stretch of canvas on the floor is existential. It is the hand-wrought, the discernible movement of the artist’s hand on the canvas.

Andrews uses rough rags, thick house paint brushes and even her hands. She thins the paint or grabs it straight from the palette working up layers of color, playing opaque against transparent, matte against gloss, like-values against disparate hues. Areas of violently conflicting colors co-exist with passages of peaceful resolve. Her process also includes cutting the canvas in strips, then rearranging them. Engaged by the beauty created as the pieces are juxtaposed, slipped one against the other, the co-mingling of the bands is done viscerally and intuitively.

This technique is one the artist has developed on her own; it is a practice of self-discovery and experiment. It is a game that she enjoys playing as so many artists before her have, Picasso in particular and Pollock too where in Hans Namuth’s film he dances on the canvas, splattering paint on this spot and that is if possessed by none other than the momentum of his actions.

Finally, the success of Andrews’ paintings is the fact that they appear effortless. Her seductive surfaces that hold passages of warm glides coalescing with cool sweeps or endless columns that appear to trap burning embers of uncontrollable matter assert the desire to play, the need to organize, and the will to paint.