Andrew Barco

I have been living and creating in Durham for the last three years. My work has been shown in Providence, RI, Chapel Hill and Durham, NC. With an education background in the philosophy, literature, and history of Europe, my work, while often focusing on the Southern landscape as subject matter,  struggles to bring a contemporary voice to the great questions that have obsessed humanity since the beginning.  These paintings are a part of a large series of work I did in reaction to reading the Sonnets to Orpheus by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.    Rilke's poetry demands a total dedication and servitude to Art (he ends one poem "you must change your life").  These paintings are in a sense "documentation" of my attempts to live out and test the truth of Rilke's writing, which I tried to inhabit, embody, or explore either through poetic interpretation, performance art, or through the act of painting itself.  Central to this series I the constant question of how do we evolve and grow, personally, spiritually, and as artists