Art, Andy Weeks

Visual art uniquely challenges the reader’s willingness to confront immediate beauty in an intellectual space. This is to suggest that, while to hear music is to confront immediate beauty; and while to read or to hear literature spoken aloud is to constantly analyze, all the while expecting that the finished poem or story will satisfy our desire to know beauty that is a culmination fought for; art challenges us to analyze its elements but does not withhold from us some kind of coherent impact in the very moment we glimpse it. Or, at least, so as not to seem pedantic, I think that my favorite art does this.

I am very impressed with an artist currently living, a youngish man named Andy Weeks. Now, there is a bit of disclosure necessary if I am going to talk about him: he is a friend of mine. He happens, however, to be one of my more talented friends, and you can judge for yourself whether I write wrongly or rightly that he is maturing into a remarkable painter: www.andyweeks.net. I recently saw his painting Brooklyn 1 at a show. It would be in an inaccessibly relative comment to say that it was the standout piece; so I will add to that by saying that the painting is realistic, charming, atmospheric, and elegant. Andy is deft with line and, while he is dealing with a place that actually exists (the view is of a building from the Brooklyn Bridge), he is not afraid to give precedence to the formal composition of line and color, allowing composition to impinge ever so slightly on realism. One of the loveliest aspects of the painting is the strip of shiny wet road that bends towards the painting’s dominant point, a massive brown building. In person, I could see that the extremely realistic shininess of the road was accomplished with a few simple blotches of white-gray paint that were offset by some sharp lines of shadow. And Mr. Weeks has subtly favored an angle in place of a presumably straight foundation for this building. The angle points us back to the road and to a tree that almost billows up.

Many of the great masters of painting that we admire today used simple tools; only they used them with care – one might say that they dignified the medium by being precise enough with it that it would give their vision its full power.