Selected Catalog Essays

New Acquisitions: Uniting Past and Present
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San Antonio Museum of Art  2007
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- David S. Rubin, Curator of Contemporary Art

Uniting Past and Present
 
I’ve traveled a considerable amount and have come into contact with architecture, painting, sculpture, music and customs… whatever any group of people or society privately or unconsciously creates as important…I digest it for awhile, think about it, and invariably some vestige, some residue or slight image from that experience comes forward in time.  – Andrew Young
 
Through his travels and passion for collecting relics from many cultures, Chicago-based artist Andrew Young developed an interest in recapturing the past and connecting it to the present.  Accordingly, for his paintings of the 1990s he used the medium of egg tempera, which was favored by the Old Masters but is rarely employed today.  In an effort to be authentic in his process, Young made the tempera himself by mixing egg yolks with ground rocks and minerals.  As he applied it over wood panels laid flat on the floor, he learned to control the medium, such that he could produce crackling surfaces to attain the effect of old, aging walls.  His pictorial vocabulary, a blending of floral and architectural motifs, reflects the artist’s desire for balance between the natural environment and the industrialized world.  Similarly, his palette of blue-green and gold refers to a longing for harmonious unity between the banality of the material world (in this case water and sky) and the splendor of ephemeral or imagined spiritual realms.​
                     SAMA Recent acquisition
                    Enter the Marsh, 1996-97
                    Egg tempera on wood panel
                     44 x 32 in.
                               Gallery view of Enter the Marsh, 1996-97, at The San Antonio Museum of Art in 2008.
                          The magazine of the San Antonio Museum of Art, VIEW, featuring an exhibition of watercolors by
​           Walton Ford titled, Tigers of Wrath, and an inside page describing the museum's recent acquisition of Enter the Marsh.