Andrea Mulder-Slater

By Andrea Mulder-Slater   When I make a painting, I am either looking at something (a landscape, a coffee cup, a house…) or - in the case of my abstracts - I am thinking about a place (the ocean, the forest, the city…).  However, the inspiration for the Sight Unseen series came from a very different place. 

 by Andrea Mulder-Slater Yesterday, I was putting the finishing touches on the fourth of a series of paintings I’ve been working on over the past several weeks.    I have been really pumped about these new works, and was looking forward to sharing the off-beat story behind how they came to be.    What I'm trying to say is, I was feeling pretty jazzed. So much so, I even took a selfie.   

by Andrea Mulder-Slater They say dreams are when our minds sort through painful emotional experiences, and by dreaming, our brains work out solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had.    Several months after my dad died, I had two dreams that gave me strength during a pretty dark time. 

by Andrea Mulder-Slater   I bought this apron at a garage sale when I was in my last year of art school.    It was a warm fall day and my mom and I had taken a walk through a subdivision located just behind where my parents owned an audio store in Barrie Ontario.

 by Andrea Mulder-Slater   The house was two stories high with big, boxy rooms, low pile carpet and very little furniture which meant our voices echoed every time any of us spoke.    There were what seemed like 10 bedrooms on the second floor, and in the basement was a barn full of animals, resulting in the entire house smelling of hay and horses.    It was our first night in the place and I was asleep, in a room on my own, when I heard and smelled what I thought was a goat at the foot of my bed.   

 by Andrea Mulder-Slater       Ten things I will not do.    1) Drink booze.   I once threw up on a security guard's foot at an outdoor concert. I was a teenager. Drinking just didn't hold any appeal after that.    2) Eat raw meat/fish.   Um, enough said.   3) Stop loving chocolate.   Dark chocolate is a source of iron so I'm basically harming myself if I don't eat it.