Mount Sneffles – San Juan Mountains

Andy Young teaches first grade in Albuquerque Public Schools. He teaches the kiddos to read, write, and do math and includes as many art projects as he possibly can. He’s been teaching for 30 years and still likes it. He also likes hiking, gardening, and singing. His wife, Tina, loves all those things too, which works out quite well. Lately Andy has been baking a lot of bread. His dad, interior designer Ernest Young, loved looking at paintings of the gorgeous New Mexico landscape. That love of landscapes is probably why Andy also loves looking at and painting them.  Andy’s son, Albuquerque artist Simon Young, has little interest in painting the gorgeous New Mexico landscape but he would have no trouble creating a fresco on the ceiling of a vast gothic chapel somewhere, or creating elaborate woodcuts in a medieval workshop. Andy’s daughter has no interest in painting anything anywhere, but she and Andy go to Cane’s a lot and eat fried chicken, which is just as fulfilling. She is also willing to hiking in the Grand Canyon and other terribly difficult locales. None of these people would be anywhere near New Mexico if it weren’t for Andy’s mom who went to summer camp in the Jemez Mountains when she was a teen, where she learned a lot of ghost stories she passed on to Andy when he was young. 

Artist Statement:

I’ve been drawing all my life but only started painting recently. I first tried to paint the style landscapes I loved best- the same ones my father loved- impressionist renderings of the southwest. We loved Wilson Hurley; my father gave me a framed Wilson Hurley print when I went to college. But I also loved Ed Mell’s art-deco inspired landscapes, and I’ve always loved the comics- Peanuts and Bloom County, B.C. and Tumbleweeds. I think I’m trying to put all this together: Hurley and Mell and Charles Schultz. I majored in Architecture for a while, back when we still had to learn to draw to be architects, and training in that particular kind of drawing is in me, too.