Andy
England

I use the imagery of the city to give shared form to feelings we recognize but rarely stop to examine. Los Angeles, its streets, infrastructure, and overlooked corners, is not my subject but my vocabulary: a set of surfaces and structures through which emotional experience can be made visible without being explained.

My practice currently spans two bodies of work with different emotional registers but the same underlying instinct.

In my paintings on canvas, I work from direct observation of everyday urban life: faded signs, telephone poles, unattended bicycles, long shadows. These scenes are stripped down in the studio, simplified toward the way a place looks when you close your eyes and reconstruct it. Human figures are absent. Their presence is implied through what has been left behind. The feelings here are quiet: stillness, longing, nostalgia.

In my mixed media works on paper, the feelings have gotten darker. Industrial structures, refineries, transmission towers, and grids are transferred onto layered grounds of collage, acrylic, ink, and varnish. Each piece begins with deliberate construction, then control is released: paint runs, ink bleeds. The image transfer sits on top of all of it, precise and indifferent, the way systems sit on top of lives. There is a frustration at the core of this work, not a private frustration but a shared one.

What connects them is the starting point: a feeling that needs form, and a city full of images ready to carry it.