Artist Statement

ANDREW CSAFORDI I ARTIST STATEMENT

"Through each encaustic painting, I bring the viewer into an organic sky, landscape, or imaginative fantasy unlike any other. I like to think that the luminous, textural paintings reach out and draw the viewer in. It’s the kind of painting you want to touch".

Andrew uses rich layers of pure beeswax and damar tree resin as the painting medium. For colour in the beeswax, dry pigments / oils, as well as fiber, wood, metal and other materials (ever growing) are used in combination to tell a story about “life around us, below the surface” and “the roots that ground the world above”. Realistic at times, impressionistic at other times, each work takes you on an imaginative voyage.

Sometimes moody, sometimes whimsical, always thought-provoking, it feels at times as though he has reached down with both hands and ripped up the earth to show his viewers what lies beneath the surface ... literally and metaphorically. Each painting takes you to another world … a world to explore and fuel one's imagination.

To get there, you sometimes have to allow yourself to pass through the lushly interlaced entanglements affixed to the paintings.

This combination of painting and dimensional layering is intended to have you engage and walk into and through the work. At times it may feel like a struggle to navigate the domain of twisted vines, a rural fence, or just wire and twine.

Seductively inviting, just a bit uneasy. Andrew invites his viewers to find their portal to a mysterious, luminous and textural world beyond.

In Andrew's paintings there is a sense of the past connecting to the present. All things change, things grow, they are built, then deteriorate and come back to life.

A natural cycle. Andrew's paintings capture a moment in time, part of a cycle, he builds several layers of coloured beeswax, constructs, then melts or takes back to earlier layers and builds again back and forth until there is a harmony to the art.

You are invited to become an explorer of dream-like possibilities in his wonderfully imaginative world.