Florida native Andrew Boesch was born in Winter Park in 1992 and has lived in and around the area his entire life. Andrew became interested in art at an early age. His mother introduced him at the Maitland Art Center, a historic site founded and designed by artist and architect Andre Smith in 1937 as an artist colony dedicated to experimental art where he was taught drawing. But Andrew didn’t like to paint within the lines and was soon drifting into his own world of imaginary imagery. A Picasso exhibit at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg exposed Andrew to the concept of taking representational imagery into different dimensions and breaking the boundaries as only Picasso could do. Having worked mostly in graphite pencil, he eventually approached a longtime friend and established artist Peter Pettegrew to allow him to drop by his studio and tutor him in working with paint. Andrew was finally ready to approach color. What happened next was pure alchemy. Instead of leading Andrew down his own path of representational painting, Pettegrew, a fellow musician, placed a massive blank canvas on his easel, loaded the palette with color, put jazz music on the stereo and told Andrew to just put paint to canvas in any way he felt inclined. He knew Andrew as an improvisational musician who had little use for structure. As a guitarist who would intentionally play with his instrument slightly out of tune to throw his more classically trained friends off balance. An artist who didn’t draw within the lines. Andrew immediately found the parallels between music and art. He found it to be an expression much like the spontaneous invention of melodic solo lines, where you “hear” the notes in your head a split-second before you play them. When music becomes more of a language than a formula. Where phrasing and expression have more weight than playing the right note. What begins as shapes that he sees in his mind become dissolved into forms that either remain or disappear. There is a layering of paint that is similar to the laying down of tracks in a recording studio. Andrew’s abstractions have an atmospheric quality that is hard to describe. They can be an underwater vision or a glimpse into the vast reaches of space. It all depends on how you choose to view it. Andrew has come to love the process of painting. The end result can have a completely different look than it had along the way. Each piece becomes a journey from start to finish. And always there is always music playing in the background as he works. What it becomes is completely up to chance. And in the end we have an Andrew Boesch painting to enjoy. “What I love about abstract painting is the freedom” Andrew tells me. “It’s less direct. And that everybody sees it differently”.