Maude Andrade. Bio.

About the Artist

As an artist Maude Andrade’s vision has inspired her to explore creative expression through several different media in her career. She has achieved national recognition as an award-winning textile and clothing designer with a passion for surface design. Her work has been featured in Ornament, Fiberarts and other publications. As well as lecturing and serving as a jury selection member, she has exhibited at the prestigious Smithsonian Craft Show, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, Atelier, the American Craft Council Shows, and at leading galleries around the country. In her quest to push the boundaries of her evocative visual imagery, Andrade began to focus exclusively on the fine arts, creating mixed-media paintings, prints and silk-screened images in limited-edition series.

In her New Mexico studio, Andrade transmutes everything she sees and thinks about into her own alphabet of organic and geometric shapes. “My painting is a distillation, like a poem but made without words,” she explains. Intentionally confining herself to a few abstract forms, she repeatedly revisits and reconfigures them in new arrangements painted in subtle, muted colors. Her compositions suggest familiar yet mysterious terrain: this could be a map of an unknown city; that could be letters from another language. Inspiration comes from the natural world, from ancient cultures and archetypes, or from an everyday urban sight, like the pattern of stripes on a parking lot pavement.

Andrade uses both paint and collage in her work. She compares her creative process to traveling through time and space without ever leaving the moment. “I like the idea of bringing the essence of something into the world in order to see it differently” she said. A sense of elegance and calm prevails. She strives to achieve equanimity, capturing the tensions between mass and scale, volume and space yet seeking a balance. “I’m always looking for a resolution, where it’s apparent to me that everything fits together. It’s my way of communicating and telling a story."

-- Leslie Clark, Santa Fe, NM

Artist Resume