Ted Andersen
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StatementHeading out to the woodshed is a phrase used by musicians for a concentrated period of practice and regeneration. My version of this feverish retreat was to spend a decade trudging through messed-up fields across Northern California, planting trees in the exhausted and embattled watersheds that border the sprawl of the suburbs. After thousands of nursery pots lay empty in the mud, I began to wonder if I could translate all the questions these trees were asking me into painting. An immersion in Environmental Restoration involves not a soulful escape to the sublime beauty of nature, but a negotiation with the cast-off and degraded sites of our culture –-- a frustrating purgatory made up of golf course edges, dump sites and Big Box backyards. These landscapes keep begging the question: What is authentic? What is native? Is a "designed “wild"’ possible? For Restoration is fraught with a despairing anxiety –-- that the same hubris that destroyed a place is now operating behind the optimistic effort to repair it.My paintings are rooted in this confused territory of compromise and ambivalence. They chart human systems of order colliding into the unmanageable. In the paintings, discordant realisms and ideas are layered one over the other until the image becomes unruly, and the viewer is inundated by a thicketed space. I hope to re-wild the act of seeing . . . to confound the gaze, and have the viewer oscillate between grasping and vertigo, unmoored from horizon or ground. In the studio I am forever assessing whether the work is becoming too clear and understandable, or too chaotic and elusive. I want the paintings to exist in the over-saturated mid-point, in a just-unraveling knot of representation.Rather than depicting a specific place, the works look to the visual language of bureaucratic environmental science as the starting point for their composition -- such authoritative diagrams as Department of Forestry hierarchical flow charts, restoration planting maps, and office floor plans for my local county Water Agency -- all unabashed systems of order that in the paintings eventually become overwhelmed by a deluge of foliated information.These are navigations through a crisis of mastery. Essential to their process is my absurdly inefficient use of a tiny #1 brush -- in such large-scale paintings, this practice effectively short-circuits any grandiose statement. Control becomes impossible before such a hyper-complex environment. The audacity of resolution is derailed by both the folly of imploding human design, and by the feral anarchy of wild diversity.BioTed Andersen lives in Northern California, near the banks of the cow-muddied Americano Creek. Sometime after receiving a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Temple University, he pursued a course of post-graduate study at Sonoma State University in Hydrology and Environmental Planning and Mitigation. This led to ten years as an Environmental Restoration Engineer with Circuit Rider Productions in Windsor, CA. After this, he was part of the founding faculty at the Oxbow School, in Napa CA, helping design their curriculum, and teaching painting and drawing there for five years. He has also taught at California College of the Arts in Oakland. Ted's work was selected for New American Paintings, Issue #73 (curated by Alma Ruiz of LAMOCA). He has had solo exhibitions at the Lawrence Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, and he has been in group exhibitions at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (curated by Kenneth Baker of the SF Chronicle) and in Current Trends in Bay Area Painting at the San Mateo Art Foundation, and most recently in the Outlandish exhibition at the Bedford Gallery, curated by Allison Gass of SFMOMA. His favorite color is water.
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