How can the canvas be the loving awareness that holds struggle and joy and everything in between?
I’m a citizen artist and a creative witness to events, both benign and terrible. Yesterday’s celebration can be combined with today’s disaster.
I explore the frontier, the edge of intimacy or conflict. I go on pilgrimages where I’m the plein-air painter, the prophet or the fool in the midst of some devotion. I collaborate with the public and with other artists from lands afar.
I explore art-making as an embodied spiritual practice and as a means of democratic participation. This endeavor has led to journeys and collaborations with the public in places such as Pakistan, the Republican and Democratic political conventions, US Presidential Inaugurations and in spots where the unhoused live.
Some kind of calligraphy arrives as I let my brush strokes echo the waves of the sea and the dances of distinct feeling states.
The resulting work: paintings, scrolls, performances and videos, can be immediate or multilayered as I move through many locations and stories.
I try to make both the ordinary and the unfathomable my stomping ground.
Biography
Andrew Purchin is a citizen artist whose practice is rooted in mixed media art, dance improvisation, film and psychotherapy. He graduated with a B.A in his own major, “The Arts and Social Action” from UC Santa Cruz in 1985 and a Masters Degree in Social Work from San Francisco State University in 1990.
Purchin has been artist in residence at the Fields Project in Oregon Illinois (2003, 2004), Vermont Studio Center (2005) and Atlantic Center for the Arts (Juried by Joan Snyder, 2017), His residency with the Santa Cruz Artist Recycling Center (2019) resulted in the exhibition, “Temple of Sapienism” at the R. Blitzer Gallery.
With his Creative Listening Project, Purchin paints, listens and encourages creativity at sites where there can be grief, discord and celebration.
A creative listening internet friendship led Purchin to travel Pakistan to create and exhibit "Encounters on the Frontier” with artist Mohsin Shafi at the National College of Arts in Pakistan in 2014 and for Shafi to join Purchin to create and exhibit “Upsidedownland” at the Radius Gallery in Santa Cruz in 2015. This collaboration is ongoing.
Purchin’s collaborated with the public as they marked on The Curious Scroll at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 2016 and in Santa Cruz County before the 2018 election. Purchin received the 2020 Ron Kovic Peace Prize for his short documentary, The Curious Scroll.
Purchin is a 2022 recipient of a Santa Cruz City Arts Recovery and Design Grant for his social practice and documentary project about our housing crisis, “What’s Home? Creative Listening Across Differences.” Purchin paired ten visual and performing artists each with a housed person and an unhoused person. This resulted in five visual art installations which Purchin curated at the Radius Gallery and in a night of performances and documentary screenings at The 418 Project. This project also garnered a grant from the Awesome Foundation of Santa Cruz in 2023. This resulted in three completed short documentaries: “Don’t Give Up on Us Now,” (2023) “The Heart in the Middle: How Art Transforms Pain” (2024) and “You and I are a Work of Art (2024). “You and I are a Work of Art” has been screened at several film festivals.