Andrea Schumacher

My drawings tend to be created in spontaneous manner, but the source materials have been well-researched and considered. Many of the images have been integrated from a variety of sources; textbooks, encyclopedias, coloring books, comic books, grocery store circulars, and the yellow pages; images from everyday life.  I distill these source materials into more elemental images. I like to utilize images of people, products, processes that are ideals; images that are meant to sell a product or explain a principle. I like to use diagrammatic devices to explain more ambiguous processes. These are the issues I think about and the sources I refer to when making images.

             
I work back and forth between printmaking, drawing and (recently) sculpture. What happens in each media informs and enhances the others. I tend to have a somewhat digressive nature as an artist. My thinking naturally goes off on tangents that seem inexplicable to others. My drawing/painting practice is where I allow myself to work in a fairly spontaneous manner. I plan more for prints and sculptures. As I grow older these leaps of thought seem less divergent and more coherent and the tangents begin to make sense to the casual observer. In my mind I have shorthanded my concerns to the realm of comfort and control. These two issues seem to me to be at the heart of the American lifestyle.