Born in the city of Baton Rouge in the great state of Louisiana, Andrea had the good fortune to be surrounded by creative family members. She attended the Kansas City Art Institute where she earned her BFA and later earned her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Her delicate work, inspired by personally pivotal events, is translucent, fluid, and in some instances seems to emit light. She has traditionally worked in a smaller scale but is embarking on making larger pieces after her recent show at E.A.S.T.
Biography: b. February 12, 1968 Andrea Pramuk is originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Being raised by an art professor and museum curator, Andrea naturally gravitated to art and painting. Soon, it became her life long pursuit. After attending the Kansas City Art Institute and receiving her BFA, she attended the University of Texas at Austin and received her MFA. Today, she is simultaneously pursuing her art career and a career in graphic design and marketing at a local wood painting panel manufacturer. With daily exposure to new materials for artists, she takes full advantage of this unique opportunity to explore diverse applications for her work in mixed media. Andrea is always seeking ways to use her work to support her many humanitarian and environmental causes and is driven by the desire to give new meaning and purpose to what it means to be an artist today both locally and globally. Currently, she lives in Austin, Texas.
Statement: My current body of work called After-life is inspired by a collective of experiences I recently experienced in a very short period of time. My father had a catastrophic stroke, a close friend of mine passed away and the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico creating one of the largest human-made environmental disasters in history. Top that with the biggest tsunami ever to hit Japan and hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, both causing human and natural suffering beyond comprehension. The only way for me to deal with these issues and my disappointment with our government and society as a whole was to work through it, digest it and represent it in a way I’ve found otherwise verbally impossible, and, it takes more than one kind of paint to do that. I also wanted to figure out a way I could help support my (now) personal causes by making and sharing art about these things.
After-life
The tiny paintings I have been producing are in essence, studies in materials to help me work through developing a language to express things I see and feel that I can't necessarily communicate otherwise. The paintings included in the group called After-life are made by building up puddles of floating pigment. I wanted to construct three-dimensional, yet soft spaces to move through, touch, or brush away like smoke. Inspired by the death of a close friend, my father’s stroke and the oil spill in the Gulf last year, I began exploring the passage of time from this world to the next and what that experience might look and feel like.
Trees of Life
These events have made me question my existence and my relationship to the universe and how we all might transcend space and time to connect. How do you deal with things that are so much bigger than yourself? The newest paintings I've been making are the closest I've been able to come to visually expressing something like "runner's high" or a feeling of weightlessness and movement, similar also to the creative space one might enter while making art or running for long periods of time.
Read more in an interview with Andrea on our Artmuse blog.
Purchase Andrea's art here.