Mix Magazine
SPRING 2OO4
SPRING 2OO4
"I don't want my work to become propaganda"
Name: Andy DeCola
Age: 25 years old
Homebase: Toronto
Education: Graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design, Dundas Valley School of Art (Foundation Studies and second-year studio)
Artist Statement: As a kid in the '80s and '90s, I spent countless hours outside having fun with friends, playing games, going on vacations, and spending lots of quality time with family. In that twenty-year period, I also remember a big part of my childhood and teen years were spent in front of the television, watching films, and reading magazines from Guns & Ammo to TeenBop. While growing up it seemed that sometimes fashion, music, television, and film were the most important things for you to know and have to survive the halls of the school.
My work has somehow always evolved into being a reflection of my love and hate for popular culture. I don't set out in any work of art to have an overt political agenda because I don't want my work to become propaganda. Work that is highly political is what it is - political art. I find there is a lot more room for critical thinking when the work lays down the most concise but simple ideas, leaving you questioning your view of the work. In my work I use "bits & pieces" - logos and signs, along with commercial packaging and advertising - in order to convey the mood of our times.
All my paintings are painted simultaneously with one another - I'm never working on one painting at a time. This allows colour and design ideas to flow from canvas to canvas, creating repetition, variation, and a unified body of work. The subject matter is projected onto the canvas but isn't rendered and painted in it's true photographic form. Pencil lines, underpaint, and loosely based painted logos and and figures make up the painterly pop aesthetic of my work.
The nonrealist painting style plays and comments on popular culture by blurring lines, literally and metaphorically, in the sense that watching television and looking through a magazine can be overwhelming at times, blurring the perception. When this occurs, our eyes pick up the "bits & pieces" - lines, shapes and colours - which essentially have become my body of work.
What character do you think would make the best professor? And Why? George Orwell's Napoleon (Animal Farm), Robert Crumb's (Fritz the Cat), Robert McKimson's Foghorn Leghorn (Looney Tunes)
Well, you've got a dictator, a very liberal cat, and a preaching Republican chicken. I thought long and hard on this one. Even though I think most cats are satanic and frightening, I would have to go with Fritz. You've got both extremes of personalities with the other two and I would like to hear the ideas of someone a little more open-minded.
Mantra: "Deal with it." - Joe DeCola
What's next?
In March, Valley Boys, a show at Gallery Neubacher with Nathan James. On April 2nd I'll be taking part in a Virgin Thread Market event showcasing fashion and art, at the old Irwin Toy Factory. Also I am starting a series of small paintings that will be shown at Affordable Art Fair in New York in October.
Worst artistic experience Trying to paint in a gutted, dark, uninsulated, Blair Witch house in the middle of winter with Ted Tucker's paintings of child beauty-queens leering at my every brush stroke.