​Andy's Bio

     Andy Kay spent a lifetime in the arts studying, absorbing, melding, and passing on to a wide range of students the artistic traditions and cultures of the East, the West, and some islands in between.

 

     Born in Queens, N.Y., on July 17, 1948, Andy spent his first four years in the then U.S. Panama Canal Zone where his draftee father served as a doctor at the U.S. Army’s Gorgas Hospital. He lived the rest of his childhood and teens in Cincinnati, Ohio. In his early teens he became enraptured by the experimental 1950’s television series “Japanese Brush Painting with Takahiko Mirakami.” Director of the Japanese Art Center in San Francisco Mirakami introduced viewers to the techniques and philosophy of Sumi-e, Japanese monochrome ink painting. It became a dominant theme in Andy’s life and art.

 

     1967 found Andy a reluctant first-year pre-med student at Washington U. in St. Louis, pursuing his father’s dream that he become a doctor also. Salvation came in the guise of the Arab/Israeli Six Day War. Andy volunteered to work on an Israeli kibbutz, freeing up an Israeli citizen for the defense forces. His father, an ardent Israel supporter, could hardly oppose the gambit. Thus, Andy happily left academia and a traditional career behind. His stint on the kibbutz being less lengthy than anticipated, Andy managed to spend six months relishing life in Old City Jerusalem, and also studying etching and lithography at the Bet-Sallel Art School. He then spent a month in Egypt bicycling up the Nile from Cairo to the Giza Necropolis. 

 

     1968-70 saw Andy in New York, where he enjoyed a brief fling in the movie industry; scoring film-union membership and meeting lifelong friends. Off the sets he also studied Sumi-e from Chinese master Ho Tit -Wah, then presiding at his China Art Atelier. As a side gig he executed elaborate hand-painted costumes for the Joffrey Ballet. For exercise he took dance lessons under legendary ballet dance teacher Nina Fonoroff. The dance lessons enabled a successful audition in 1971 for the Ballet Schule im den Stuttgart Ballet in Germany, then world famous under the direction of the inimitable John Cranko and the great ballet mistress Anne Woolliams. 

 

     Age twenty-two being a little late to start a serious dance career, Cranko soon convinced Andy that his principal talents lay in the visual arts. He recruited Andy as his assistant and liaison to the costumes and sets departments. Concurrently Andy spent two years studying stage and costume design at Stuttgart’s Staatliche Akademie der Bilden Kunste. These experiences laid foundation for his lifelong work in theatrical design. Over the next forty years Andy devised costumes and/or sets for dance productions of the Stuttgart Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Frankfurt Opera Ballet, the Jamison Projects in Detroit and New York, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He even managed the “dressing” of Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park for a 2007 appearance by the Dali Lama. In this project Andy first designed, and then supervised paid “After School Matters” art students at seven Chicago high schools, as they executed sections of the huge banners which formed a backdrop for the Dali Lama’s lecture.

 

     While in Stuttgart Andy was also able to pursue his studies and develop a lasting relationship with Ho Tit Wah, his former Zen teacher in New York, who was at that time traveling and exhibiting his art work in Europe.  In 1975 Andy returned to the. U.S., where he lived in Los Angeles creating set designs for Harold Ramis’ “Supervision” serial for Public Television, and painting costumes with French inks on Chinese silks for the San Francisco Ballet.

 

     In 1977 fate offered peripatetic Andy a brief visit to Hawaii. Love kept him there.  Andy had taken time off from his film work to fly out to Honolulu and help his Sumi-e master Ho Tit-Wah establish his Iron Flower Chan Art Center. On the side, on Memorial Day, he met his soulmate for the next 45 years, cashed in his return ticket, and domesticated.

 

     In 1980-81 Andy’s work from this early Hawaii period was included in a traveling exhibition with Master Ho that was displayed in the National Gallery of China in Beijing, the Museums of Fine Arts in Hangzhou and Canton, and a gig as one of the first artist exchanges from the West to newly reopened China. In Beijing he was given the exceptional honor of being asked to lecture and demonstrate his painting techniques to art students and gatherings of Chinese artists and museum directors.  He found himself in the humbling position of teaching Chinese students, just emerging from the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, some of their own art traditions.

 

     In these same years, and for a decade or so after, Andy’s main works in the Western tradition, were paintings on silk, derived from techniques learned in his ballet and theater background. These were paintings with aniline dyes on antique and modern silks collected from around the world. He took traditional vehicles of Eastern art – folded fans, hanging scrolls, kites, costumes – and infused them with more lighthearted Western coloration. The paintings on silk evoked a happy blend of East and West. On one hand the controlled elegance of traditional Chinese painting. On the other an exuberant use of color, reflecting his Western heritage and background in classical dance. These silk paintings – aniline dyes brushed on silks fixed by a laborious and lengthy steaming process - were very popular. The mid-eighties saw sold-out shows at the Arnhart Gallery in L.A., and Nina’s Choice Gallery in the Bergdorf Goodman store in N.Y.C. His paintings on silk were also featured in a two-year tour of seven Mid-West art museums sponsored by the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

     In addition to his Sumi-e and paintings-on-silk creations, especially after 1983, Andy branched out with paintings in oils and acrylics and works in collage. For the latter, he was especially partial to incorporating gold & silver leaf and Chinese spirit money. All these techniques were well represented through frequent solo and group exhibitions in galleries around the world, through many site-specific corporate commissions, major pieces for public spaces in Hawaii and abroad, and through numerous works in private collections.

 

     A sponge by nature, after settling in Hawaii Andy soon imbibed inspiration from the unique artistic traditions of Polynesia. A solid subset of Andy’s artistic work featured Hawaiian themes. Andy’s favorite references for these Hawaiian works included: the legend of the god Lono, patron of the annual Makahiki harvest festivals; the umbilical piko symbols of birth and regeneration; and the origins story “Law of the Splintered Paddle,” when King Kamehameha I, uniter of Hawaii’s many islands, came to a belated realization of justice and mercy.

[Andy’s Hawaiian-themed work are especially featured in the Watercolors and Metalics Section pf this site.]

 

     A repeated Andy enthusiasm was working in collaboration with, and learning from, other artists; usually in fields somewhat removed from his own. He partnered for several years with the Chinese artist Liu Dan in a partnership christened “Ulu Mau Studios” (Ulu mau being the Hawaiian words for “ever growing” or “ever green”). The partnership flourished during Dan’s post-China-early-U.S. years in Hawaii. They collaborated on several corporate commissions, most notably on Ulu Mau Studio’s commission for the premier of Patrice Matignon’s ballet “Happy Birthday” at the Frankfurt Opera in Germany. On that gig they did all the painting for both the dancers’ multi-colored costumes and the sumptuous sets.

[Andy’s collaborative work with Liu Dan is featured in the Ulu Mau Studios Section on this site.]

    

      Andy was also intrigued by pottery. He never mastered the art of throwing pots, but relished collaboration with two premier potters, Ann Rathbun and Claude Horan. On a number of occasions, they threw the pots which Andy painted, both parties to high standards.

[Some of Andy’s collaborations with Ann Rathbun & Claude Horan are shown in the section of this web site titled Andy’s Personal Collections Sale as items no. 174-186.]

 

     One of Andy’s multitude of friends said after his passing: “He was the most consistently joyful person I know — what an infectious smile and big heart.” Andy never seemed quite so joyful as when engaged in teaching others the arts he loved. He taught a variety of techniques in many venues for the last forty years of his life. In Honolulu - he taught Zen art for fifteen years in the Department of Education’s Adult Education Program, for six years at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Hawaii, and for five years at Hawaii Tokai International University. He didn’t just limit himself teaching.  On many occasions Andy took the time, and used his connections, to ensure that his students were provided venues where they could display their work. - In addition to his teaching on Oahu, and to facilitate his love of travel, Andy developed a workshop introducing the basics of Zen painting, collage, or both. This interactive institute was held in art-related locations on Maui and the Big Island; on the U.S. Mainland in Arizona, California, Maine, New York, & Washington State; and, in Europe, the Basque Country of Spain, the Tuscan Region of Italy, Den Hague in the Netherlands, and Munich and Berlin in Germany. In many of these locations the institute evolved into an annual event extending for five or more years.

 

     The happiest venue for Andy’s teaching was the Head Start Program at Kaneohe Elementary School a mile from our home. He described his weekly sessions as therapy and relished briefly freeing the four-and-five-year-olds from the sometime overstrict supervision of their mentors. These “sessions with my teachers” lasted for ten years. They only stopped when Andy’s heart problems made him dangerously susceptible to the colds and such brought in by the students and their insufficiently-provided-with-sick-days teachers. With these kids, as with his adult students, Andy saw value in affording affirmation by public display of their work. On one occasion, he finagled a show of his head-start-student’s paintings at the Gallery on the Pali. This oldest gallery on Oahu is located on the campus of the Unitarian Church on the Pali Highway, which connects Honolulu to our “Windward Side” of Oahu).  As it happened, during the show’s run President Obama’s grandmother died. He attended her obsequies held, fortuitously, at the Unitarian Church on the Pali.  Of course, Secret Service took over the campus to keep the presi-dential party secure. It chose the gallery where Andy’s kid’s art was displayed to house Michelle and the girls before they joined the congregation. Andy, an Obama enthusiast, couldn’t wait to tell his kids that the Obamas had been to see their show.  One five-year-old asked: “Did the president see it too?” “Of course,” said Andy.  “Who else but Michelle and Barrack would escort Malia and Sacha out to their Great Grandmother’s funeral?” The kid replied: “Cool!”