Answerd Stewart was in attendance and showcased his artwork at the first annual Sizzle Arts Festival that was held on Sept 30, 2019 in Chelsea Manhattan.
Families building their senses of home with neighborly love and spiritual connectedness. Multicolor musical instruments growing legs to dance. Pen-and-ink drawn lovers linked in a nest of the littlest lines.
These are the themes artist Answerd Stewart has been trying to capture for the past 20 years as he labors tirelessly on his latest series of fascinating works, called Brown Images, which explores the nature of relationships within the contemporary, urban landscape.Just like home, music is an important theme as well. As some argue, it is the highest of the arts because of its temporality and ephemerally as each passing note reverberates through us.
Stewart grew up in Brooklyn, New York City, indisputably the world’s foremost magical musical garden filled with the newest flowering of music and art. With immigrants from all around the world, these cultures make a cubist clash of lifestyles, histories, outlooks and expressions that keeps it all struggling in synchronicity.
“I initially created art as a means of relaxation but as people began to appreciate my work, it fueled me to create more. I create art that speaks to the whole human spectrum, any race any creed, as in “Harmonious Beginnings,” a celebration of the tying together of two souls harmonizing together, illustrating the inseparability of emotion and beauty, friendship and family, togetherness and emancipation, and love and spirituality.”
Of Jamaican-American heritage, Stewart knows what it is like to have more than one spiritual home, whether one in the islands or in the urban jungle of New York City or in the public and private places of worship, including his studio. Always unafraid to flex his creative muscles, Stewart spends weeks on each painting, delicately and defly balancing pen and ink, acrylic paints and opaque washes and many other media.
A child at play like any good artist, he is hard at work here, sounding the horn of human expressions laid down as masterfully as a virtuoso on a violin. Through his world history studies at Brooklyn College, he learned his heavy lessons, reflected in the gravity of some of his works. He graduated with a world history degree so he could teach young people, which he did steadfastly for many years.
Also a father, Stewart’s patient, teacher like and pensive sensibilities are at work when you go to decode his pieces.
And like playing a magnificent album over again, one never tires of finding new lessons which are always embedded in the oil and acrylic swatches of brushwork. Stewart has exhibited his work extensively nationwide over the years as demand for his creative vision grows.
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