Abstract Artist Working in the Realm of Digital Media
click on image to enlarge (except mobile devices)
click on image to enlarge (except mobile devices)
I’m pleased that my application “The Shape of Things to Come” to the Ohio Arts Council for the Artists With Disabilities Access Program (ADAP) grant has been approved for funding. The Ohio Arts Council does amazing work for artists and the arts in the state of Ohio and I greatly appreciate their support. This is the first work I will be producing with the grant.
Below is an excerpt from my OAC ADAP Grant application:
“With this grant, I will create 4 artworks, printed on rigid substrates as opposed to media of the traditional digital print (paper/canvas). Printing on rigid substrates opens up a new avenue of exploration in my work by allowing my geometric constructs to expand beyond the confines of square and rectangular formats with use of a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Router that can cut the substrate panel to my specifications”.
This work, titled “Thirteen Octoquads”, is the first piece I’m making with the grant funding.
I’ve been working with a variety of geometric shapes, weaved with color. Putting them together in new and unexpected ways challenges me, always with the goal of the composition to elicit a visually energetic and joyful optical experience from the viewer.
I realized that I hadn’t ever worked with Octagons. Why not, I asked myself. So, while I was resting, I imagined turning the octagon into a flower with eight squares being its petals, each projecting from it’s respective segment of the octagon. The resulting arrangement, with triangular spaces left between each adjacent square, provides a link to connect them together. The space left in the middle of 4 linked octoquads provides for smaller flowers with a radiating arrangement of 8 white diamonds. 4 of these flowers surround the central pink octoquad (see detail above).
The image above is the digital file and not the final piece. I will send the file that I’m readying to printer for fabrication.
My Husband Bruce Baumwoll created this wonderful video featuring my art and the many places it has gone to. My art is always about healing as making each work assists my mind and body with my challenges of coping with pain and mobility and this video expresses that beautifully. With access to all of my images, he curated a range of my work in different periods. The images go by fast; quick impressions building on each other. The speed and music captures the energy he sees in my art. In a way, it’s a love letter to me in video form. We’ve been together over 38 years now and I could not have created this work without his love and devotion.
Here’s what Bruce wrote about the video:
I hope you enjoy this extraordinary experience of the art of Andrew Reach, who happens to be my husband for almost 39 years now. No matter how many times while editing it, I have watched his images, it continually takes me away from self into a world of color, shape and wonder. For those of you who are just seeing the work of Andrew Reach for the first time, he was an architect and because of a rare debilitating spine disease, became disabled and reinvented himself as an artist.
I want to share the following quote by Andrew’s late uncle James Grossman. It was written for us as a comment on Amazon when Andrew had a 2012 Calendar “Circles”.
“The very existence of this art required the intersection of time, circumstance and events beyond normal understanding. Add the needed advances in personal technology, previous education, an overwhelming medical disability, the determination of one young man to fight and create, and the love of another determined to help, that is the story of these works. And with all that, the art still overwhelms the story. Full disclosure requires stating that Andrew and Bruce are my Nephews, and that I love them.”
I invite you to see Bruce’s other videos on youtube and his blog on an eclectic range of his interests.
Click here to go to his youtube channel
Click here to go to his blog Baumwoll Archives
click on image to enlarge (except mobile phones)
Octoquad – Hexadecagon, 2019
UV cured inkjet on shaped acrylic mounted on UV cured inkjet yellow composite aluminum panel, edition of 3, 24 x 24 inches