(1911-1996)
George Andrews is the patriarch of a highly creative family of
artists and writers, a family richly blessed with talent and deeply
rooted in the soil of rural Georgia. By choice, the former sharecropper,
father of ten, and lifelong artist never traveled outside Georgia's
boundaries.
When his family moved from rural Plainview, Georgia to Atlanta
in the 1950's, George relocated to Madison and became a sign painter
for the City of Madison, where he spent the rest of his life.
His passion for painting was evidenced in the brightly colored
dot-filled rocks that soon began showing up around town. Adorning
rocks, furniture, women's shoes and "anything that did not
move," with bold, colorful dots, he became known as "The
Dot Man".
George often chided his famous son, renowned artist Benny Andrews,
for attending art schools to learn to paint. "I'm a natural,"
he boasted. In 1989, when George Andrews was 78, Benny Andrews
urged his father to paint family portraits including one of the
family tree, a blend of African-American, Caucasian, Irish and
Native-American heritage. As his popularity grew, the elder Andrews
realized he needed to consider the permanence of his work and
turned to painting on canvas. Religion, dreams, and racial heritage
were consistent sources for his imagery. Andrews also incorporated
social messages aimed at an urban generation attracted to violence
and drugs.
George Andrews reached a milestone at age 84 with his first solo
museum retrospective - The Dot Man: George Andrews of Madison,
Georgia organized by the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta.
"Dad was a very complex container of much more than the
casual observer sees or hears. The survivor of an almost unbelievable
past, he became one of the most tenacious and imaginative persons
I've ever known. Ideas just bubbled out of his head like lava.
. . he was the personification of the mythical artist/poet who
sees beauty through every pore, who is driven to create regardless
of the circumstances."
- Benny Andrews
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