Artist Statement
Charlie Chongr Andrijanoff
My paintings emerge from a suspension of intentionality. I work randomly, automatically , for the most part. I do not ask myself what it is I am creating . I reach for colors instinctively, blending them on my canvas, thinning the paint to the point where it runs freely . The patterns created in this way break up the field , suggesting shapes and connective webbings from which a unified vision eventually emerges .
This approach seems to satisfy my need to find myself in a world completely separate from the one I live in consciously. I don't doubt that this was my motivation when as a kid I scribbled in the margins of school composition books and when out of school scribbled the walls of the abandoned row homes and factories of the north Philadelphia ghetto I lived in. Art as a sanctuary from harsh realities associated with poverty and ignorance, this is how I found the world of art. Later I realized that the imaginary journeys I took were journeys of the spirit to a place safe because beautiful. Beauty for me has therefore become synonymous with the power of imagination.
One starts by scribbling and ends up creating, because the scribbles are defining marks on the wall of all possibility that imagination is. I feel as responsible for my creations as I would were I asked to safeguard a piece of the infinite, because the infinite unfolds when one begins imagining.This, I believe is what the artist accesses and why people who live different lives and speak different languages can relate to the the same piece of art in identical ways. Art brings us together, introduces us to visions of beauty and truth and transforms us, this is why it is the rare day when I am not engaged in it.