ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: ANDY WELLINGTON

Caddisfly Project conducted a micro-interview with Andy Wellington, whose work is featured in Vol 02: Pressure. Andy is a painter and mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY.

We love his work for its disintegrating internal logic. There is darkness here. The temptation of color and form are ultimately withheld by black bars and foreboding spikes. The space depicted seems simultaneously infinite and claustrophobic, fathomless and false. 

The materiality and objectness of these works is in stark contrast to the digi-restlessness they evoke. In this way they are corporeal depictions of the alienation we feel as we drift through an increasingly pixelated life-scape.

CP: What is your daily routine like?

AW: Oof. The shapelessness of life during the pandemic has made my daily rhythms almost comically erratic. On the other hand, the enforced solitude and suspension of time have been very conducive to long, concentrated stretches of work.

I’m a night owl, and during a good studio session, I will often work straight through the night: I’ll bike uphill to the studio in the afternoon, then coast back home with the pre-dawn truck traffic. I like to listen to music when I’m working, and I try to resist the temptation to check email or social media until I’m done for the night.

CP: Do you have a favorite tool?

AW: A cheapo foam brush from the hardware store is my secret weapon.

CP: How would you title your retrospective?

AW: Please Decide For Me

CP: Tell us about a text, film, artwork, or piece of music that has been resonating with you lately.

"Jubilee Street" by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds has been a particular fixation. The song is ambiguous, but it seems to be about a sex worker who blackmails a john—an aging, possibly prominent man—who experiences the threat of exposure as both terrifying and redemptive. Is it a stretch to re-frame the story as some kind of Trump-era allegory? Probably, but it’s still scarily, gorgeously intense.

CP: Can you describe a bright spot during this time?

AW: Playing DnDnD (Dungeons n’ Dragons n’ Drinking) with old friends over Zoom. Eruptions of spontaneous cheering on my block the day that Trump was decisively voted out of office.