Andy
McConnell

Andy McConnell was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. His artistic inspirations run deep into recent local tradition — the Northwest Mystics (Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson and Morris Graves), George Tsutakawa, Michael Dailey, and Clayton James among others — artists he identified with since childhood and imitated in the margins of school homework.

As a student at Fairhaven College, he studied poetry and painting with the poet Robert Sund in a multi-semester independent study, and conducted oral history interviews with Pacific Northwest art luminaries Mary Randlett, Guy Anderson, Bill Cumming, Lisel Salzer, and William Radcliff.

He went on to earn a master’s degree in Applied Behavioral Science at Bastyr University and his love of people and their inner landscapes is a common visual metaphor in his work.

Most of his working life has been spent in the construction trades, the craft of which can be seen in his art. His sculptures evolved from the dust and din of job sites: scribing trim became carving forms; gluing up counter slabs led to making large, stable carving blanks; finishing blackened steel developed into staining split or carved cedar; and changing natural light in stud bays became inspiration for future compositions.

His preferred material is salvaged or repurposed — old-growth cedar pulled from job-site dumpsters, gifted boards held by friends for years, free piles on the side of the road, and occasionally (the holy grail) a cedar or maple burl.

McConnell’s work is abstract — non-representational, concerned with identity, balance, and difference. The dark areas are achieved by staining and polishing; the work uses no plaster or ceramic.

He lives and works in West Seattle. His work has been shown at VAIN in West Seattle and at JG Art Gallery. The craft is key — a habit formed across years of carpentry — and the calm compositions that result offer, in his own description, a counterbalance to change and unrest.