We recently connected with Andrea Luper and have shared our conversation below.
Andrea, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?
Each in their own unique ways, they were unapologetically themselves, no matter how eccentric or misunderstood. It took a long time (into adulthood) for me to truly recognize specifically how incredible my mother was. On paper, she is wildly interesting and accomplished, but as a kid she was just “mom”, and never thought twice about it.
Fantastic cake-artist and baker by day, body-builder by night, pilot, gardener, poker-player, antique-fanatic, fisher-woman, and all with saint-level patience and determination; she never slowed down when it came to pursuing her ambitions. lacking the social support, and constantly facing resistance from those around her, she pushed forward regardless, and always with grace. Nearing thirty, I look back at her life in awe.
I took for granted the fact that my parents were always active in their interests, grateful to have people around me with a genuine interest in life, and excitement for whats next.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
One thing is for sure, I was always an artist. There was no avoiding that. As a kid, I was always writing stories, making little books out of construction paper; into high-school was still driven by my goal of being a writer. Taking a photography class in high-school pivoted my interest into telling stories through images, but after a few years felt less interested in the profession. Someone close to me, at the time, right after graduation, saw I had a knack for drawing and recommended I take a couple community college courses for it.
I initially resisted since I was working multiple jobs and never thought college was an option for me.
But I decided to take a couple courses and just pay for the two classes out of pocket – a drawing class and a watercolor class. I fell in love with something for the first time.
Over the years I went from watercolor to gouache to acrylic, and now oils are my preferred medium.
But at the end of it all, I’m still someone who just wants to tell stories. I think of each painting like a little advent-calendar with visual treats to chew on throughout. They’re honest images, all of them ending up self portraits: these bodies bend in their cartoonish worlds, depicting different aspects of my own lived experience.
After years of working various jobs, tattooing for a few years, all while painting within the margins, I was fortunate enough to attend SVA in New York on scholarship. Setting sail from Alaska for the first time, and allowing my art to grow somewhere that felt more open to what I wanted to say with my art.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Getting out of my own way!! My early style was so heady and conceptual, divorced from who I was as a person, and way more interested in creating complex visual puzzles to unlock — making those images was painful and difficult to force out. Attending SVA began to rattle some things loose in that process, and trying to figure out a way forward was a deep process of unlearning.
I started seeing a jazz musician at the time and they suggested “automatic” drawing. Essentially relaxing my brain, and just letting shapes flow. Allowing myself to make “bad” art became a fundamental building block of my process. Now I regularly fill sheets of legal pads, printer paper, whatever I can get my hands on with terrible drawings, and from those drawings ideas start to eke out. It’s endlessly exciting, and every single recent painting started as a small drawing that grew.
I now embrace automatic art as part of me but it was the process of unlearning, not taking myself so seriously, and letting fun come first. Now my work feels inherently more me.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Permission to be as strange as passionate as excited as curious as you want to be, embarrassment doesn’t even enter the conversation. My interests can vary wildly day to day and it all ultimately adds to the creative process since my job is to be me! Cooking, baking, biking, skiing, reading about medicinal plants, or ancient pottery, playing Elden ring, cutting my own hair, failing to learn how to speak another language, poetry readings, the list continues. My job as an artist is essentially journalling all of this intake; I’m observing my perspective on living and sharing it with everyone else. And this is an endless task, which excites me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.andrealuper.com/
- Instagram: @andrealuper
Image Credits
-me