We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andrae Green a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Andrae, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I think that as an artist most of the time, especially for me the most meaningful things are what you are presently engaged in. So for me that would be my present body of work, “The DIVERS series”. The reasons and motivations for starting this series are many but the most important one for me was to help me resolve and heal from the passing of my Father.

(The Diver Series) Is a homage to my dad (that passed almost some 20 years ago) and it is also a love letter to my son. (Father and son diving together).

As a young boy, my dad used to take my family to the pier in downtown Kingston on Sundays. While on the pier I would see very young boys fearlessly jumping from the pier into the water. The image of the boy seemingly weightless in the air has always stuck with me. With these works I was trying to capture feelings of aspiration, freedom and fragility.
The visual inspiration for this work came from the “Fall of the Damned” by Peter Paul Reubens. Also “the Swimming Hole” by Thomas Eakins and “Fishing Village” by Jamaican master painting Barrington Watson. With this series I look back with fond memories of my father but also looking forward to a great future with my son and being free to move about again without the “new normal”.

Each painting is an act of remembering, recontextualizing, and recreating the past. As I paint these paintings, I hope to come to terms with my dad’s death more than twenty years ago.

Recently the work started to turn into social commentary about the memory of my formative years (growing up in the 1980s in JA). Back then the country was a prosperous and truly independent nation, then things imploded. This I believe is a mirroring of the current situation of America and the world over. But despite these obstacles to life and prosperity still we thrive, and must continuously take leaps of faith..
The series goes forward and back in time. There are many emblematic moments in the work that symbolized that time and times synchronicity are important emblems in the work. Father/Son Young/Old Play/Practice Dream Memory/Reality.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I was born in Kingston Jamaica. Although I started drawing very early in life I never really took it seriously until much later in life. Growing up the only type of art that I knew about was cartoons, Batman, Superman Spiderman etc. I never even knew about painting until going to art school.

I love painting the human figure and creating from my imagination. Although a lot of what I do is what you can term representational. I usually my paintings to be in an unusual way. I want the viewer to feel pleasure, excitement, and freedom. I hope when my work is viewed it brings good things to the viewer. So much of the imagery that we consume today is antihuman and in a lot of way toxic. I want to be the opposite of that. I want to be the opposite of that.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

NFT’s are pretty cool actually. I see it as another medium for artistic expression. I think that people are initially put off by it because they are wondering if it is a scam or something like that. Like most art its value is iffy at best until it gets codified by institutions. But I think that although it’s new and no one is just sure yet where it will go. Its cool to try and probably will be around in the future.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I think that my whole journey in accepting that I am an artist is one that shows a determination to be something even when you don’t really know what that thing is.

I grew up in Jamaica being not really poor and not rich, kind of in the middle. But when my dad died ( who was the main breadwinner for the family things got really bad for us. I took a chance to go to art school ( because I wasn’t really good at anything else). That’s when things began to click for me internally and after many failures in art school, my resolve started to grow. I started to get very determined. I was determined to prove my nay-sayers wrong. I wanted to be great at this thing that I have been doing all my life. Art school gave me perspective and community that made me believe that being an artist was possible.

After graduating undergrad I applied for grad school in the US. I got in but had no way to fund it! So, I deferred my admission.I knew that this was the direction that I had to go. Out of nowhere funding came in the form of a grant from the Jamaican government. I was awarded a full scholarship to attend the New York Academy of Art. The grant changed my life. It made me realize that anything can happen once you are determined.

Most of the time life seems very uncertain but if you find your path and believe, anything is possible. That story might seem insignificant, but it did a lot for me mentally. To know that your country believed in you. That’s the greatest thing ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.andraegreen.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/andraegreenstudios
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andraegreenstudios
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrae-green-50998628/