Portrait of Andrea Heimer

Comic-style portrait of artist Andrea Heimer for her interview for Illustrators Illustrated.

Read the full interview here.

Excerpt from the interview:

Looking at Andrea Joyce Heimer‘s paintings is like a kind of awkward time travel. Immersing yourself in her intimate painted scenes transports you to an American suburban childhood in the ’90s. She depicts sleepovers, getting ready for Prom, neighbourhood block parties, but all with an edge of sharp and uncomfortable observation and dark undertones. Andrea’s superbly intricate, odd and muddy-coloured paintings are inspired by her observations of her neighbours as she grew up in Great Falls, a small and isolated town among the wild west plains of Montana, USA. The social and personal moments that she observed are then re-imagined and become a strange kind of historical document. Alongside the delicate acrylic and pencil works, the long, descriptive titles give an insight into her almost mythical suburban landscapes.

Andrea is a self-taught painter and has just finished her time as the first artist-in-residence at Idrawalot in Berlin Neukölln. Since 2012 she has been creating a body of work called ‘Suburbia’ and the works shown at Idrawalot are part of the series ‘Suburban – Rituals’. As we chatted she was packing up a number of small paintings, the fruits of her month-long residency. Andrea is now heading back to the USA, where she paints almost full time alongside training horses on a 30 acre former dairy farm in Washington State. She has a very busy second-half of the year coming up, starting an MFA in July and having an exhibition a month until December. Taking a break from re-painting the gallery walls, Andrea described her enjoyment of peeping on her neighbours, her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan club, and how painting has been a transformative part of her life.