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Virginia Andrade Biography
Virginia Andrade is a mature artist whose connection to abstract expressionism has evolved into her current body of work. Utilizing the effects of time and wear, she explores the commonly held belief that aging is an unattractive circumstance to be avoided. Facing the challenge of her own experiences she is determining what it means to be an aging woman in today’s society. Her work develops as she continues to question, search, and experiment with methods to claim her identity.
Born in Los Angeles County, California in 1930, she was positioned on the cusp of change. She was molded by the individual struggles of discounted women desiring their own voices. Coming of age during the uncertain times of the 1950’s, women began to explore new roles. Andrade met the hostility of the status quo. Her independent nature was out of step.
Andrade’s initial success was as a landscape painter. After many years she was feeling dissatisfied and uninspired but as she expresses it, “I found difficulty moving away from a comfortable art form when my direction was unclear.” Not until her studies with Ben Sakoguchi was she challenged to explore her role as a woman artist. She experimented with different mediums, methods and materials but was uninspired by the results. Shortly after her class with Sakoguchi, Andrade moved to Grants Pass Oregon. It was in this small town environment she feels she faced herself and her own mortality. Emotion and material came together. Metal was introduced as a metaphor for the aging process, the surfaces already etched from the results of time and exposure.
Recently Andrade’s form has taken a new direction with the introduction of powdered pigment hand rubbed into and mixed with gouache as her medium. “Disposition of Age” is the quest for a new reality. It is the artist’s journey into aging and it is her intention to share the experience. The pieces reflect the imprinting of age and time rubbing against the elements and we are drawn into the surfaces. We experience a new sensitivity to aging as we sense our individual response to some unknown connection to the past.
For more information contact the artist at vlandrade@hotmail.com
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