“You can’t schedule inspiration”
Allow us to introduce you to April’s featured artist – Andrei Cojocaru – a smart and inspired collage artist with a sense of humor living and working in Paris who appears to create through happenstance and inspired moments mostly with his hands to give us new images and inventive arrangements of shapes, patterns, colors, letters and numbers. In May some of his work will be part of the Playing with a Full Deck group show at the 12×16 gallery in Portland, a show organized by Liz Cohn, who collaborated with 175 artists from all over the world to create 1400 collaborative collages on playing cards.
Originally from Bucharest, Romania, his parents’ work led the family to Paris for several years leading to attending high school and university there and eventually landing as an account executive at an advertising agency (a job he describes as “serious but with a fun, dynamic, creative side”). His first experience with making art came as a graffiti artist back in Bucharest at the age of 14 and lasting for 4 years, although he never felt particularly good or prolific. In-between his current job and earlier education, he found himself at law school, feeling bored and disappointed and looking for an outlet, something that would allow him to “escape reality to a world where he could create his own rules”. A fortuitous encounter with DeviantArt (an online community of user-made artwork) led him to being inspired by great collage artists whose work he saw there, and he started making his own.
