Hot AND talented. It doesn’t get better than that. Andrew Edward Moncrief is an emerging artist born and raised on Vancouver Island who works in varying media, focusing primarily on painting and drawing with an affinity for classical techniques.
From the Daily Xtra:
The last time we talked to him, Andrew Moncrief wasn’t at his best. The Montreal painter had gone through a heart-wrenching breakup and was in the process of piecing his life together while planning his first solo show, a darkly-tinged series called De/Generate which used physical disfigurement as a metaphor for emotional torment.
Since then, however, it’s been all blue skies. A year and a half later, he’s in love again and living in Salt Lake City with his current boyfriend, Cody (a real estate agent, designer and Utah native).
“There’s a misconception [that] artists have to be miserable to create,” Moncrief says while on a break from his studio. “If you have to be tortured to make art, that’s going to be a pretty sad life. Of course it can be a driving force behind your craft, but ultimately you can’t only work in that mode, otherwise you’re never going to enjoy what you do.”
Paralleling his personal journey, he also developed a fixation with classical religious painting, particularly Da Vinci, Rubens and Caravaggio. His interest in the images wasn’t spiritual, as much as it was a fascination with how artists of that period encoded symbols in their works through specific body and hand positions. Working with his models (including the aforementioned Cody) Moncrief had them mimic classical poses he found in his research.
The resulting images capture a certain kind of tranquillity, rather than the unbridled joy his new beau has brought. But perhaps that’s the point — instead of mining life’s highs and lows for material, Moncrief seems content to operate from a more comfortable middle place.
“I’m actually in a really good headspace,” he says. “I didn’t even know where Utah was on a map before the first time I came here. Who would have though it would have been so great for me? It’s definitely exactly where I’m supposed to be right now.”
Check out the pics below.
From his artist statement from his show at La Petit Mort gallery:
This work is uncertain, it is existential; the figures–lost and vulnerable–are inevitably me. These paintings have no answers. Instead, they are intended to act as self referential questions that inevitably fail in their ability to be defined. This desire to define the figures relates to a direct desire to define myself, a seemingly impossible task for me. What is a portrait or a self portrait but an examination of identity? It is a theme that I have been investigating for a decade. In an attempt to understand my subconscious–via meditative practices or otherwise–I have searched far and deep. Paradoxically, I find myself further from an answer.
Being lost–in the void, so to speak–is a deeply unsettling feeling. Uncertainty is unsafe. If an awareness or consciousness of our reality aids in defining where we are at any given moment, what does it mean if there is an awareness of unawareness? Stating a resolve for something unresolved is inherently contradictory, a search for that which can’t be found. The point is not the end, but rather the means to the end–the search, the journey itself, and those overwhelming, split-second moments of clarity and enlightenment. The journey is not the attainment of an answer, but the being of the question.
(Photos via SissyDude)
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