Paintings reflect a new worldview

By Dan Mac Alpine

Wed Sep 05, 2007, 06:44 PM EDT

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BEVERLY, MASS. - If you go

What: Paintings by Nedret Andre

When: Through Sept. 29, with an opening reception Sept. 9, 7-9 p.m.

Where: Celtic Corners Gallery, 196 Cabot St.

Information: 978-927-1114

When Nedret Andre speaks, her words flow in a mix of accents. British inflections dominate. Perhaps London. Certainly not Liverpool. More subtle influences surface in the odd word that keep the ear guessing. She’s discusses her “ahhht,” like a good Bostonian. There’s a hint here and there of a singsong lilt from the Maine coast. And something totally different. Not local. Not Eastern. Not Western.

The verbal weave reflects the cross-cultural tapestry visible in paintings on view at the Celtic Corners Gallery on Cabot Street.

Andre blends in her art. She blends media — layered oil and acrylic. She blends materials — sometimes bits of rope wend their way through a painting giving the piece depth and texture beyond the paint layers she builds up. And she blends myriad influences — Bruegel’s landscapes, cityscapes and silk-screened patterns influenced by the tradition of the woven Persian rug.

The multiple, sometimes disparate, cultures expressed in her speech and her art reflect Andre’s own life path. Her parents are Turkish, but she was born in London and spent three years in Turkey for high school. She’s lived in the Boston area for 17 years, earning a master’s degree at the Maine College of Art in Portland, a bachelor’s at the Massachusetts College of Art and a business degree at the University of North London. Now she teaches at North Shore Community College.

“There’s nothing pure about my paintings,” says Andre. “It’s all a mix. That’s my philosophy, to blend.”

Thus, her paintings are rarely about one place, one style or one medium. The oils mix with acrylic silkscreen over bits of cardboard or rope. Scenes juxtapose the Bosphorus Straight in Turkey, the symbolic dividing line/bridge between Europe and Asia, the Thames River and the Boston skyline, with the different elements dominating different areas of the canvas.

Andre’s paintings aren’t fully landscapes. They aren’t fully abstract. They aren’t fully impressionistic. Just when the mind latches onto a thread, it pulls the eye into a new, unfamiliar space, keeping the viewer off balance, guessing and questioning.

Which, is, of course, the point.

“It’s not just my view,” Andre says. “It’s also what you see.”

The result is a form she calls a “culturescape.”

“I’m not interested in just one perspective,” Andre says. “The 19th-century landscape. That’s one perspective. One world view.”

But, that’s the past. Andre’s work looks to the future. With travel more accessible, an increasingly interdependent world economy and improved, immediate communication, not just via trained journalists, but via average people, Andre’s experience — and her art — points to a time when people will be more than citizens of a country, but be citizens of the world. The ultimate nomads.

“The paintings are about the world I live in,” Andre says. “Life is not a binary choice.”

Hence elements of Bruegel’s landscapes, particularly his juxtaposition of people of different classes and status that populate his landscapes, and patterns of Holbin carpets in Turkey, “the fluid movement of one culture to another.”

Around, through and under all these influences, Andre’s love of color overarches her work. Color unites, or if not unites it at least links, the various elements, influences and media in her paintings. In “Twilight,” a red sky ranging from crimson to maroon to almost black billows over a city skyline, a river and a patch of farmer’s field on the opposite bank, all in a red palette, with the field done a glowing, harvest-grain yellow. Such colors make Andre’s paintings a feast for the eye as well as food for thought.

“The color aspect is the joy of painting,” the artist says. “I need to have fun with that.”