Andres Mazzei
Artist Statement
I became involved in art as a child looking at cartoons on TV. I loved watching Cliford, I also liked playing videogames with my brother on the weekends. I would draw the characters I saw on the screen on paper with crayons. As I grew, my drawings became more elaborate. I began to draw anime characters when I started reading manga in high school, then I began to draw comics of my own. As I began to develop more skill, I began picking up designing posters, eventually I started painting on canvas, my art continues to evolve as I become more indulged in perfecting my skill. When I got better at difierent mediums, the rest of them became better at the same time. I’d like to create a space for people’s minds to take the stage. I want people to appreciate the visual pleasantness of my work and admire the forms I put down on paper, but my mission as an artist, if I have one, is to give my audience an experience in which their thoughts can be given power. I want people to stop feeling like art and entertainment are mere distractions to the practical things we do to fulfill our lives. My art wants to be free, and alive. I portray experiences in which the audiences can find themselves in, I want my audience to realize that life is much more comical and inclined to our emotions, rather than what our surroundings urge us to act on. My art consists of characters, landscapes, shapes, and colors that have not been seen before, but the stories they tell are the ones we have running in our minds in our society every waking hour. I want to bring reality something that has been taken from the network of thoughts and feelings inside our minds and put it on paper, put it on the wall, and even putting it on clothes. I want my audience to look at themselves through my pieces, and hopefully gain insight on things they didn’t expect to. My art wants to be honest, and it wants to tell the truth through color, not written or implied ideas. I wish to have an impact on my audience’s life the same way our dreams do. I can draw inspiration from anything, sometimes art comes from a mixture of events in life, sometimes it comes instantly. Whenever I begin to work, I draft as much as I can to get all my ideas down, then I just develop very few ideas that I like the most. Whenever I have a solid idea of what I want to say, I begin to work on a final draft, whether that be a design on a computer, or mixed media illustration. I’m rarely satisfied when something is “finished” because every art piece is transient. It is a representation of our current self, which will never cease to change and transform itself, and I find that the most fascinating thing about art.
