Andrew Myers - Visual Artist

Born in Braunschweig, Germany and raised in Ciudad Real, Spain, Andrew’s exposure to modern European living and classical architecture prompted the universal and classical themes, yet modern design, found in his artwork. At the age of 20, Andrew applied to the Art Institute of Southern California (now known as the Laguna College of Art and Design - LCAD) with no previous art training. While touring the school, Andrew saw students depicting live models in clay, and he immediately knew he wanted to be a sculptor. Andrew was accepted based upon the natural talent his application portfolio evidenced. While studying at LCAD, Andrew developed his skills through advanced figurative sculpture and accelerated painting curriculum.  These two and a half years of creative training provided Andrew with the basic working knowledge of the artistic field, but it was his drive and passion for creativity that allowed him to cultivate his particular style. Andrew now resides in Laguna Beach, California.

Andrew’s signature artwork is Screw Art which is a very unique form of art. Thousands of screws get drilled into a wood board very closely to each other but at different depths to create a sculptural relief of the image, where each screw head becomes a canvas. This steel canvas then gets painted over with a size-0 brush to mimic the actual image. Each final product is a true testament to craft, strength, and artistry.

Although Andrew is best known for his screw pieces, his work spans multiple genres and mediums, including sculpting, painting, and drawing. Every art piece is an experiment in art, mathematics and creative problem solving. Because Andrew’s artworks are very time and labor intensive, he only produces about 10-12 screw pieces a year.

Andrew always continues to push the boundaries of his craft constantly searching for new subjects and unconventional mediums. His guiding principle is to create better art today than he did yesterday.

Artist Statement:

“A journey. Not a destination. Over the last two decades, I have seen my art change in a multitude of ways. More importantly, I have changed in a multitude of ways.

Being an artist is a lifestyle, it’s not a job. It’s not a choice nor a conscious decision, but more so, it is who I am; it is how I think and how I live. The physical creation of the art is based on hard work and ethic, yet the art itself finds its birth in my soul and in a place that is not an art studio but rather a kitchen table.

My thoughts, my ideas, my pain, my joy, and my feelings are all cultivated outside of the studio, making the creative process a daily one and the one I cannot escape. The studio, on the other hand, is the space of craft, assemblage, and execution of the emotions I have already felt, and the art I have already finished in my head.

I am not the type of artist to stand in front of a blank canvas and wait for inspiration, or to let the moment determine key moves and the feeling determine a stroke of the brush. I create and execute the art in my brain before my hands do the work. 

My calling in art has always been that of a translator. I have invented my own language through being unique and expressing what makes me a distinctive individual. This language is basically my unique fingerprint. I aim to be different, and I live in this feeling knowing that the only way to do this is to be purely myself.

My art will always continue to grow, and I will continue to change. This growth is my journey, and it is all I have. Because now more than ever, it’s about the journey, not the destination.”

ANDREW MYERS: THE WHOLE IMAGE IS THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

By Peter Frank

“Vision is vision, technique is technique. Technique is invented; vision is inherent. We learn this from the work of Andrew Myers not only because he has created a way of making pictures out of screws – in effect, composing for two dimensions with three dimensions and enjoying the benefits of each – but because his vision encompasses the fundamental making of pictures and the way(s) they are made.  

Does Myers see the screws first and then the image they are to comprise? Or does the image anticipate the medium? Logically you’d say he has the picture ready to fabricate, but you look more closely at the fields of screws conformed into low reliefs – low reliefs that at once mimic the flatness of photographs and approximate the volume and surface of sculpture – and the method seems no less capable of driving Myers’ mind than does the subject matter. Especially considering the subtle colorations and shadows with which the artist modifies the screw patterns, each piece is in effect a dialogue between subject and form. This dialogue is a basic condition of visual art, one Myers articulates with a graceful simplicity and wit – a wit that proposes that things aren’t as simple as they seem, or perhaps that they are also that simple.

Whence the complexity? Where has Myers invested the intricacy of his design and fabrication so that his simplicity has something to play off of? In the fields of screws, on the one hand, the expanses of metal pointillism – nothing like digital pixels, you’ll notice, but more like leaves of grass – and on the other hand in the exacting naturalism of the objects and figures depicted, as screw-fields and otherwise.

There very much is an “otherwise” to Myers’ art. Rendering imagery in screws is only one facet of his artistic thinking and production (if perhaps the largest, and best known, single facet). Trained as a classical realist sculptor, Myers to this day relies on his knowledge of and sensitivity to anatomy. His portrait heads can be uncanny, so enlivened are they by the soul behind the face. Not content to bring inanimate material to life, Myers also subjects these deeply human visages to restrained but still jarring modifications, interventions bordering on the non sequitur that bring these works back to the modernist-post modernist discourse. The partial fracturing of the planes of the face (for example) hint broadly at the pathos within, interrupting but not dissolving the mask of self-possession we all try to wear in public. Myers’ subjects here are in the process of letting their guard down, but are caught in mid-act, even towards the beginning, as if Myers caught them transforming into who they really are as they cross over the threshold into their safe spaces.

Myers is a gifted builder; if he hadn’t wandered into a sculpture demonstration at the Laguna College of Art and Design one day and had a revelation about what he was put on earth for, he might have become a designer of furniture or an architect or something that calls for a high level of ingenuity and the commitment of hands to mind. Some of his more abstract works, following on the handcrafted aesthetic driving the screw art, suggest or even function as household fixtures – if the household were an almost museum-like space of elegant refinery. Indeed, some of the screw art pieces follow this abstract model, intimating a further level of meaning and form – complexity – than what the screw artworks have already widely demonstrated.

On the other hand (as it were), Myers is no less virtuosic with the traditional two-dimensional image. We generally accept sculptors’ gift for drawing but we balk at their painting chops, as if they were pitchers who could supposedly also hit. But Western art – among other world traditions – features numerous painters who sculpt, and vice versa, from Michelangelo to Picasso, and Myers displays such in-studio ambidexterity in spades. Again, his focus is the human individual, but cast in diverse contexts, from traditional seated portrait to allegorical or fantastical mural.

Myers’ vast technical reach and depictive sensitivity manages to infuse everything he does, right down to the seemingly superficial screw pictures. Furthermore, although such sizzle sells steak, he does not merely exploit his gifts to wow his audience but invites us to broaden our set ideas about art, presentation, and representation. His is a gentle and even entertaining challenge, but it is a challenge nonetheless: don’t pigeonhole creativity, unbind it and follow it where it leads “Screw-art” may be punchy and effective branding, but it hardly encapsulates Myers’ oeuvre in restrictive labeling – especially considering everything else he does, has done, and can do.

This is how strategies of self-presentation work for Myers. He changes minds and eyes not through radical gesture, recondite concept, or broad satire, but through skilled, clever, and insightful expansion of familiar practices. He engages the decorative impulse but does not indulge it. He achieves naturalistic eloquence without resorting to visual tricks or even trompe-l’oeil. He brings art history and theory into the discussion without relying pedantically on its obscurities. His is a comfortable approach to art, deft and caring, but it is much more than comfort he strives to share with us. Myers wants to provide his audience both fun and insight and values the viewer as a discerning and readily educable witness at least as much as an awed and eager client.

Ingeniously conceived and expertly realized, Andrew Myers’ art wants to talk with you, not just show off – although show off it does, indeed insisting that there’s room for artfulness in contemporary art. In an age of virtual display, Myers specializes in demonstrating the glories and profundities of the actual. In that regard, above all others, he is a consummate realist.”

Los Angeles

April 2023

Exhibits and Shows:

2018-2019: Luz Botero Fine Art Gallery, Panama City, Panama

2018-2019: Mass MoCA “Come To Your Senses”

2018-2019: West Palm Beach Antique, Jewelry and Art Showcase

2018: Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary, West Palm Beach

2018: Art Wynwood, Miami

2018: Art Boca Raton, Boca Raton, FL

2018: Art New York, NY

2017-2018: Context Art Miami, Miami

2017: Art Palm Springs

2017: LA Art Show

2015 - 2017: Art Basel, Miami

2003-2017: Festival Of Arts, Laguna Beach, CA

2015 - 2016: Art Miami, Miami

2015: Solo show, Lawrence Cantor Fine Art

2015: Art Miami, New York

2015: Art South Hamptons, New York

2015: Art Miami, Silicon Valley

2012 - 2015: Scope Miami

2012 - 2015: Scope New York

2014: LA Art Show

2014: Palette to Palate, Laguna Beach Art Museum

2012 - 2014: Houston Fine Art Fair

2012 - 2014: James Gallery, Pittsburgh PA GS

2012 - 2014: Austin Art Projects, Palm Springs GS

2012 - 2014: CES Contemporary

2012 - 2014: The Gabba Gallery

2012 - 2014: Extreme Materials II, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY

2012 - 2014: SEEDS Fine Art Exhibit

2012 - 2014: Joanne Artman Gallery

2012-2014: Art Hamptons

2012: Wanrooij Gallery, Holland

2006 - 2010: Sculpture Site Gallery, San Francisco, Group shows

2003 - 2006: Debilzan gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

Clients:

·    Tiffany & Co (New York City, Honolulu, Hawaii, White Plains, NY)

·     Marriott Hotels Headquarters (Washington DC)

·     Bosch (Germany)

·     Audi (Germany)

·     Nike (USA)

·     Hurley (USA)

·     Design District, Dallas, Texas (USA)

·     Turnbull & Asser (UK)

·     Tender Greens (USA)

·     Daniel Mckenna (USA)

·     Wickes (UK)

·     Converse (USA)

·     City of Laguna Beach (USA)

·     Many other private collections throughout the world.

Publications:  

Coast Magazine, Orange Coast Magazine, Laguna Beach Magazine, HotBook Magazine, Lamono Magazine Spain, Juxtapoz Magazine, Readers Digest, American Lifestyle, McGrath Magazine; Sculptural Pursuit; Coastline;

Online articles:

DOLCE Mag; Art Summit; OC Register; Laguna Beach Magazine; The Forest Magazine; The Marriott Traveler: Storybooked; Museum Week Magazine; Yatzer; My Modern Met; Uproxx; Modern Luxury: San Diego; Modern Luxury: Riviera;