60 watt Edison style light bulbsMoney Tree (68)

by Andrew Ekins

Artist’s Statement

Drawing is a crucial part of my practice as an artist.  It provides a direct connection from initial thought to the physical embodiment of an idea, from the intimate, interior, imaginative state to that of the external world. It is, as Roland Barthes said “the hand’s desire”.

For some time, obsessively, I have been drawing trees, skeletal, single, isolated, enduring: Godot-like. With these “Money Tree” drawings I have been using a deliberately restricted language, layering and repeating simple rhetoric of mark making and erasures to build a bare form, to render an image. Each individual drawing stands alone, but all are connected by cumulative marks of the hand. The tics and glitches, inconsistencies and corruptions generate a multitude of 90 individual drawings abstracted from the idea of a tree but exploring the symbolism of the tree as an emblem of life and growth.