Andrew Wapinksi is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA.  He obtained a bachelor’s degree with a major in painting and a minor in art history from Kutztown University in Kutztown, PA.  He was part a of a graduate studies program through Syracuse University that included a traveling seminar in Italy.  He also received an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Delaware.

Wapinksi has been part of several group and solo shows throughout Delaware and Pennsylvania and in 2008 received the Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship for Established Artist in Painting.  In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington, DE.

Wapinski’s paintings are DEEP.  The panels on which they are painted are 2-3 inches deep and the surfaces are created with up to 30 layers of pigment infused resin, resulting in a rich and atmospheric glazing effect.  Wapinski bases his works on nature and the natural flow of texture and color and the scientific properties of his materials.  These paintings are as intriguing in their technique as they are in their fluid visual natural abstraction.

“My work addresses the give and take relationship that has always existed between man and nature.  Visually I draw inspiration from landscape and the suggestion of open space.  My goal is to explore man made attempts to control and organize that space and its natural elements.  As a result, visual references to mapping, architecture, and industrial structures are used abstractly and metaphorically.

I have rooted my work in process and raw materials by juxtaposing artistic materials with traditional significance against modern industrial coatings.  Gold, silver and other metals have become major components in my work as they are interwoven into man’s pursuit for progression and history with nature.  For me these materials symbolize and reflect man’s earliest attempts to investigate and understand natural elements through organization and building, artistic exploration, alchemical processes and spiritual enlightenment.  Symbolically these materials also reflect man’s associations with personal growth, knowledge, wealth, power, and war.  Creating the potential for an endless cycle of creation and destruction to take place both natural and man made.

My process involves a push and pull between additive and reductive layers of materials.  This openly reveals the struggle for balance among deferring elements.  I hope to invoke a sense of history and time in the physical surfaces of my paintings suggesting to the viewer that there may be an equal sense of beauty in accomplishment and decay.”