EVOKE Contemporary | 11/25-12/18 | Santa Fe, NM

Inner Landscapes

Andrew Shears presents around 15 new works at EVOKE Contemporary in his moody, minimalist style.

In a new series of work hosted at EVOKE Contemporary, painter Andrew Shears explores his own inner landscape, or what he calls his “inscape.” The artist highlights his memories, dreams and visions in more than a dozen small, monochromatic, oil paintings. Shears diverts from older themes in the show I’ll Get Back to You, as an excuse to “paint a cohesive group of pictures that have been floating around in my head for a while (always thinking ‘I’ll get back to you’),” he says.Foothills, oil on panel, 8 x 10”

Shears’ intent behind his minimalist beauties is for the viewer to take in the series of work from a distance, upon first walking into the gallery. “The pieces are all strategically placed together because they’re all linked,” the artist explains. “I’m building this montage of images or landscapes to set up the narrative, which is basically a bunch of imagery taken from my experiences. Some are from my imagination; dreams I’ve had or specific scenes that were potent for me in a book or a movie.”Desert Lights, oil on panel, 8 x 10”

His piece Foothills, featuring a black and white hilly landscape, was the first painted in the series, and was the catalyst for the theme. “This is a view from my house where I grew up in Boulder, Colorado,” Shears says. “It can be really easy for artists to complicate a show and say too much, but this is from my childhood—it’s that simple. Overall, [this series] shows the mood I have in my head all the time.”

Shears notes that several pieces were simply fun to make, but still reflect his natural sensibilities—often dark and gloomy. “In dreams, books and movies, we often twist [the vision] to make it our own,” he remarks. “We all have a certain palette for our memories or maybe it’s a sound or specific music that floats around in our heads.” Works like Desert Lights, showing a fading sky in dark blues and a landscape dotted with city lights, along with Spotlight, of an artificially-lit hill, exemplify Shears’ own version of a particular scene. Palm Dream, oil on panel, 8 x 10”

Nocturne, oil on panel, 8 x 10"

Another example of his “mood” is illustrated in Palm Dream, showing a darkly-lit palm tree placed in the very center of the painting, taken from one of the artist's vivid dreams. “It’s like one of those dreams that you never forget and sticks out,” he shares. “At the time, I was watching movies and reading a lot of books about war, and I dreamt that I was on top of a slightly submerged submarine in the South Pacific. Chopin’s ‘Nocturne’ was playing on crackly World War II speakers and all of these bodies started to come from the water and floated like buoys. I condensed this dream into one palm tree to capture the mood of the dream in the simplest way I could.”Cowboys and Indians, oil on panel, 8 x 10"

Other works in the show hint at human experiences we all share, as seen Nocturne—another dark scene that shows a small piece of sky through a break in the clouds, highlighting the edges of a tree. “At an old studio of mine, there was a sliding back door that opened out to an industrial parking lot in a rough neighborhood,” says Shears. “I would stand in that door and soak it all in, and this piece is part of what I saw. It was so compelling and it’s a vivid memory that I was struck by. Sometimes you come across something and you think you know it—kind of like when you see someone at the grocery store and you think to yourself, ‘they look familiar, do I know them?’”Spotlight, oil on panel, 8 x 10"Shears wants to convey a calm, quiet visual viewing experience. “I understand that some elements to these works are recognizable,” he says, “but mostly, there’s something about looking at a vast landscape or a sky that causes you to go inward and that’s what I want people to feel. I want the pieces viewed from 30 feet away as a whole before they have a more intimate experience with them.”