Andrea Cybyk A&M Exhibiting Artist Interview October 2023

Speakers: Andrea Cybyk, Painter & Printmaker www.AndreaCybyk.com

Andrea Cybyk: My name is Andrea Cybyk and my show at Artists & Makers is called Growing Still. This is a collection of modern botanical pieces that capture small moments of calm within the messy reality of our busy lives. My process is a combination of painting and monotype print making techniques. I work in acrylic paint on both paper and Duralar polyester film. I work with, I work directly with plants that I find on my walks in my neighborhood, and sometimes I'm capturing the crisp silhouette of a plant. Other times, I'm capturing the intricate details of the veins and the leaves in the plant. I tend to favor things like invasive grasses, bamboo, anything that you would call the weed, things like that that flourish without a lot of assistance from people. As I was creating this body of work, I realized that it fell into kind of three basic guidelines or parameters. And so those are that I'm using analogous colors within each piece rather than using a lot of contrasting colors. I'm focusing each piece on just one plant at a time and I'm allowing the liberal use of white space. For me that provides a sense of calm within each piece and the pieces themselves, they either adhere to or break those rules according to whim. But collectively they weave, you know, weave a story of a rich and varied life.

Andrea Cybyk: My favorite part of showing here at Artists & Makers is the beautiful gallery space. The lovely artists who've been welcoming and curious about my work, and the open invitation to creativity that this exhibit provided.

Andrea Cybyk: I'm both a painter and a print maker. But my background is in engineering and I worked in the software industry for many years. I think there's a precision that came from all that math and you know, technical training that influences my work, whether it's the modern botanicals or the geometric abstract work that I do.