Joe Andoe (American b. 1955)

Inspired by his roots in the American Great Plains, Joe Andoe is admired for his minimal landscapes and idealized depictions of horses, dogs, deer, buffalo, wolves and flowers. Joe Andoe was born in 1955 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Andoe comes from a farming family and is part Cherokee. He earned an M.F.A. from the University of Oklahoma, Norman. He has lived in New York City since 1985. His simple and elegant images of animals and landscapes and soulful sensitivity of his interpretation of his subjects still refer to his roots in the Great Plains.

Andoe's Iris prints are based upon his oil paintings, which are created using an original reductive technique. A heavy, coarse-weave canvas is first primed with white gesso, then covered entirely with a thick, black paint. While the paint is still wet, Andoe incises outlines of the forms that he will create. He then wipes off the paint to reveal the coarse-weave canvas beneath. He will rub a little paint back onto the surface with his fingertip and wipe some off again, but he does not use brushes. The paintings are very tactile with contrasts between the rich, dense velvety blackness of the background paint and the rough texture of the canvas left with remnants of black pigment caught in the weave.

His signature style is the use of simple foreground subjects that show the remnants of black pigment caught in the weave of the canvas surrounded by a completely dark background

Andoe has worked with the composition of a single horse within a rectangular or square canvas hung at 90 degrees as a diamond since the early 1990s. He has also painted minimal flat landscapes, flowers, dogs, deer and buffalo. Recently he has started to paint two horses on the canvas for the first time.

His paintings are represented in the permanent collections of: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; and St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO.