February 2025: Andie Furtado - Oil Painting

Andie Furtado is an oil painter whose choppy, color charged approach seems to energetically splinter her subjects. Finding inspiration from ‘the everyday’, her style pulls from the chipped paint and industrial color schemes of the city. Her compositions, follow suit, and feature utilitarian  and household objects she cloaks her figures with to create societal metaphors.  Through wielding the mundane into a metaphorical visual language, she prompts the viewer to connect to overarching topics of the human experience today. 

Comforted' is a piece that rests at the cross-section of fatigue and rest, burn out and self care. The composition was conceptualized from experiences of chronic fatigue, which is commonly tethered to feelings of shame and defeat, in a society that pushes productivity. However, the melancholy warm tone throughout the piece lends itself to a feeling of acceptance, while the energetic pinks in the figure simultaneously evoke an air of invigoration. 'Comforted' conveys a feeling of solace within granting ourselves rest, in a world so hectic, and a shift to viewing it as a well deserved gift.