Dear Reader

If I was a piece of art I would be Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It encapsulates the essence of me. I am expressionism personified:

“A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.

Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist’s own sensibility to the world’s representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.”

My name is Andrea. I was almost called Jessica (I would have preferred Scarlett or Violet)…but Andrea it is. I have a husband, two brothers and some parents. I am tattooed and pierced (not too much, although I am working towards a sleeve). I am a big fan of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton. I see beauty in the designs of Vivienne Westwood, the music of Tuomas Holopainen and the art of Pre-Raphaelites. I am a South African expat living in London – to earn some pounds, do some travelling, see some bands and figure out what to do with myself (ourselves). I (we) are having a blast! We have no long term plans. I am not a great planner. I like spontaneity, which is not always a good thing. I love life. I love living. I have a passion for literature, art, films and music. I love to write and paint. I love my friends. I love to travel. I love to headbang. There are so many things that inspire me, including God and metal. As my friends will tell you, when I am around silence is a rarity. In fact my big mouth often gets me in to trouble. Talk about ‘foot-in-mouth’ disease. I truly feel somewhat incomplete if I am not reading and writing. I enjoy perusing art galleries and the sites of Europe. I write primarily for myself – because I love it. And I write to entertain. I write in response to LIFE, which inspires me so.

Thanks for reading!