Andrew Boardman, Editor of The Site at MANOVERBOARD.com, has painted and drawn for over ten years. He also has a growing graphic and Web design firm providing a range of design services from Web site design and development to logo, stationery, and brochure design. For more information, click on Design at left.

Andrew Boardman's paintings and drawings can be found by clicking The Paintings or The Animations buttons at left. We hope that you will find them at least somewhat interesting.


An Example.


The paintings and drawings featured herein by Andrew Boardman speak to two primary concerns: the immaterial and base occupation of artworks themselves, which stand in for our collective supernal futures and the revaluation of painting and figuration after the psychic transgressions that have haunted us since 1945.

The first concern was born during the act of studying paintings within the odd gallery spaces of European museums. These paintings, regardless of content or form or discretion, for some incredible reason FLOAT. They defy gravity. They deftly sit on flat walls and forgive their own groundedness. They are objects unlike any other object because, as stationary, floating forms, they also stand in for our desires to fly, to be free, to be unencumbered by gravitational pull, and the earth and the sun nearby. Paintings hover above the plane of perception and therefore connect to a painless expression of the ineffable and the perceptual aspirations of our animal selves.

Another example, this time of a drawing.

An example from Kabbalistic literature might illuminate the boundlessness that painting represents for Andrew Boardman:

The depth of primordial being is called Boundless. Because of its concealment from all creatures above and below, it is also called Nothingness. If one asks, "What is it?" the answer is, "Nothing," meaning: No one can understand anything about it. It is negated of every conception. No one can know anything about it -- except the belief that it exists. Its existence cannot be grasped by anyone other than it. Therefore, its name is "I am becoming."

(Matt, Daniel C. The Essential Kabbalah. HarperCollins, 1983. p. 67.)

A story of Andy Warhol comes to mind. When asked by an interested party what his paintings meant, he replied "They don't mean anything. They are simply what you are seeing before you" -- perhaps meaning to say that paintings exist and are caught in the act of becoming.

The second concern that permeates Andrew Boardman's work is an intractable belief that we have inherited a world ever more calcified than the one before 1945. The imagery of a world turned inside out by civilization during the Second World War continues to haunt our every human action today, every little sneeze and snort, every laugh and lament. Andrew Boardman's paintings and drawings are an attempt at gaining access to that prelapsarian world through the damaged prism of the present. His is an attempt that looks to such painters as Philip Guston (1913-1980), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Barnett Newman (1905-1971), Ben Shahn (1898-1969), and Morris Louis (1912-1962), who all grappled with the intimacy of our mid-century ethical and aesthetic transition through the singular post-war illusion of making paintings.

Please visit Andrew Boardman's artwork by clicking either The Paintings or The Animations. He also has an ongoing online art project called The Golem which you can find at http://www.thegolem.com.

Of course, if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us. Thank you.


-- Bramden Wradoan, Head Curator, The Site at MANOVERBOARD.com