Andrea Joyce Heimer

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: Http://www.andrea-joyce.com

City / State: Ferndale, WA

The focus of my work is narrative painting. I am an adult adoptee whose records are sealed, meaning I have no access to my own biographical, birth, and heritage information. It’s from this perspective that I make my work, autobiographical mythologies combining what I know about myself with what I don’t—in a sense, creating and recording my own history. My work draws inspiration from other narrative-based forms of art, including ancient Greek black- and red-figure vases, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and the pictographic Native art of my home state of Montana. The concept behind each painting begins as a written story, with visuals following. Above all my work exposes painful and embarrassing realities in a flatly matter-of-fact visual manner, as a means of acceptance through serenity.