ANDREW ramiro TIRADO

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“My examination of the motif of the hand exemplifies connection with people, place, and possibility. Yet also of separation, dislocation, and unattainability. I desire my work to speak to the whole of life. Not an airbrushed, idealized life, but one containing voids, gaps, depressions. The dark and confusing valleys as well as the sunlit peaks.

Someone has said that all art is self-portraiture. If so, then it’s correspondingly true that when we view art, as happens with songs meaningful to us, we overlay our lives with the work, imparting to the forms, the textures, the colors, etc., meaning deeply personal to us. We can’t help but view the work through a filter of our experiences, our beliefs, our thoughts, both fleeting and enduring. We embed ourselves in the work.

And yet, art can also draw us – both the viewer and the artist – out of ourselves and provide us with a glimpse of the transcendent.

My studio practice connects me, if tenuously, with the ineffable. That connection, itself, is at the core of the activity, the process, and the life – an ever unfolding apperception of mystery, of the sublime, like a closed fist unfolds when reaching out to connect with Other. Initially, after reconnecting with art, I would try to package my thoughts about the work’s meaning into something self-contained. That is, since the work obviously came from my efforts, I assumed that its origin, and therefore, ultimately, its significance, also sprung from within me.

I’m coming to terms with the idea that art has something to say through, and perhaps at all times in spite, of me.”