Andrea Wilson
Sydney, Australia
Website
andreawilsonpainter.com
I began painting about 6 years ago after a death meditation. Until then I was a practicing architect. A death meditation isn’t as grim as it sounds. You ask yourself ‘what would you change about your life if you knew you only had a short time to live’. And of course the answer for me was painting. Shortly after that I entered a competition and won which led to closing my architecture practice to become a full time painter.
People often ask why I chose architecture instead of art, and my mother always said I should be a painter. But when I was young I didn’t have the confidence or foresight to be a painter. Now I do. No
I have many favourite artists and my list changes and gets longer all the time, but there are some constants including (Australians)Lucy Culliton and Euan Macleod, (Americans) Emilio Villalba and Catherine Kehoe, as well as early 20th century painters Gwen John, Édouard Vuillard and Victor Popkov
My process and style is painterly contemporary realism. But it is also experimental and changes constantly along with my subject matter which jumps between still lives, landscapes, animals, insects and portraits. This is deliberate. I don’t want to get stuck with one genre, but also -I see paintings in everything.
I guess there’s a bit of architecture there too. In architecture there is an ethos which is about allowing the building to be what it wants to be, but to achieve this first requires an deep understanding of the site and its cultural and environmental context. It might seem a stretch, but I think like this when I’m painting something as small as a fly. The fly must be what it wants to be -aside from how I see it as an engineering marvel with glorious iridescent skin and extraordinary eyes, it is alive. The process of painting a fly is a kind of confirmation that its life is as important to it as mine is to me.
