Work & Process | Mandie Anderson

What would we do if God made each of us utterly identical? Well, we would probably do the same thing all the time for one. But that’s not true for us. We have each been fearfully and wonderfully made in his image, everyone having their own personality and full of their own quirks. Mandie is a professional observer of God’s creativity. I had the opportunity to catch up with Mandie to learn more about her story and her process of lovingly depicting human experiences.

When did you fall in love with art and art making? What has your art profession been like throughout your life?

Mandie’s parents always supported her and her brother’s endeavors. They paid for her piano and dance lessons, but the thing that stuck the most was her drawing lessons.

“I must have shown some sort of aptitude or interest as a very, very young person, and they were always enrolling me in some kind of art class with one-on-one tutors that sort of thing.” 

She recalls growing up in a household where everyone in her family would seemingly be in their separate corners working on their passions and interests. These early interpersonal observation skills would continue to blossom in Mandie, making her the caring and compassionate portraitist she is today.

When she was still young, she created a character named Carrie. Mandie would draw Carrie going on all kinds of adventures, and her friends would collect the doodles like trading cards. The more people invested in her creativity, the more she pursued a future as an artist. Mandie remembers when her aunt gave her a trapper keeper, which included a bunch of useful art supplies like a blending stump, a kneeded eraser, and her first set of real pencils. “And at that point, I went from “Oh, this is really fun to do when I do it in my free time,” to “Oh, I think I’m gonna make a career out of this.”” Her love changed from art in elementary school to Illustration in high school when she became inspired by Norman Rockwell, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas. “I would get a stack of books and tear apart the imagery like piece by piece, brush stroke by brush stroke.” Before long, Mandie would be enrolled in oil painting classes to continue to grow in her craft.

Mandie attended Indiana Wesleyan University to study English and Illustration because of her love for literature and art. Later, during college, she dropped her English major to focus on Illustration. “At the time, I wanted to create art that had a tangible and specific purpose for a client.” But before she graduated from college, she added a Graphic Design major.

“For the pragmatic Mandy McDonald—maiden name—of 2009, I needed to figure out how to pay off my college loans using only my charisma and art.”

She married her husband soon after they graduated and moved to South Florida for about a year, right at the beginning of the recession. She took on her first freelance position for OneHope in Pompano Beach, FL. They make educational, humanitarian, evangelical, Highlights-style magazines and books for underserved countries. It was an incredible opportunity, and they took a lot of risks on me.” Mandie pretty much only took on freelance graphic design jobs after college to help make ends meet, though she would take on Illustration.

After giving birth to her two boys, Owen and Felix, Mandie took a break from building her career to stay home with her boys for a few years. While it was a hard decision to make, as many parents know, it was full of a different set of blessings and growth. When her youngest entered Kindergarten, Mandie went back to school to get her Master’s in Illustration so that she could teach.

Mandie wants to reboot her career and mentor and inspire the minds of college students. For the past few years, she has been able to teach classes at Taylor University and Butler University. Teaching has given Mandie a new purpose because college students present an opportunity to pour into people's lives “on the cusp of a massive transition period.” Mandie loves discussing “Art History, Philosophy, connecting, and networking. I really feel like I've landed in a career where I can continue to work and do what I want to do in terms of my own craft, but I also get to serve people that are also in that space.”

Mandie’s career has had some ups and downs, starting with being an artist in one of the worst hiring freezes in the country. Through her ability to continuously pursue art, she has used her perseverance to inspire many young artists and people. Being able to work with students in this way has been one of Mandie's greatest treasures because she has an avenue to encourage the next generation to cling close to their ambitions through whatever life throws at them. She also gets to talk about the artists who inspired her and many more, opening students’ minds to the vast possibilities and avenues art can play in their lives.

How would you describe your community?

Outside of her peers and students at Butler University, Mandie loves her art community in Creatives Class, which takes place during the Sunday School hour. She finds it an excellent place to wrestle with art and faith.

“It has affected how I think about imperfections, infallibility, and liturgical art.”

Mandie loves having a community that she can relate to on multiple levels. “There are a few women in the Creatives Class who are also in my Community Group—Esther Gray, Kyrie Lewis, Bethany Sanders, and Martha Surridge.” Together, they have art nights, where they work or talk about their current projects and pursuits. With the rest of her community group, they often delve into conversations about the interconnectedness of art, literature, and theology.

Mandie is also a part-time teacher with Art Mix. She is very passionate about working with people with disabilities, and she is a big advocate for seeing more Redeemer people get involved with the organization.

How would you describe your work and your practice? (How has your work been described to you?)

People have often expressed how clear it is to see the heart and empathy that Mandie puts into her work. Mandie prefers to draw and paint people in her work. Her goal is often to depict a person in a way that places the viewer into the story she is depicting. By doing this, she hopes the viewer will connect more with the subject or character.

Her techniques for emotionally stirring, visual storytelling include:

• Using soft-rim lighting to depict the emotion in the subject’s expression

• Depicting a genuine and recognizable likeness of the subject’s face

“It's just trying to do like the slightest interpretation of the Image of God and someone else.” 

In her most recent show, “The Way I See,” she wants each piece to strike a chord with the viewer and help everyone recognize that weightiness. 

There are levels to seeing her work well:

1. First, there is identifying the likeness of the subject

2. Next, the viewer should be faced with how they view or see themselves based on the subject’s story depicted

3. Lastly, Mandie hopes that the viewer will be able to see past their insecurities and recognize their God-given beauty, which shines through them and the subject portrayed

“That emotional connection of who I am, what makes me tick, and why do I matter? Why does this person matter? That's the kind of thing that can be said with a paintbrush and a human hand.”

How does this same mentality play into your illustrations involving scuba-diving kids or talking animals?

“Those are passion projects. Those are me trying to get hired as a children's book illustrator.”

Before getting into her Master’s program, Mandie wrote and illustrated a few stories of different characters going on various adventures. However, storytelling through writing and illustration can be a lot of work when you don’t have an abundance of time, especially when she illustrates the stories in a traditional watercolor style. But it fuels her desire to become a children’s book illustrator one day.

She has used this experience to tell the story of how a young autistic boy uses drawings to cope with his surroundings in “Oscar’s Shapes.” Using her experiences working with people who struggle to communicate verbally, Mandie seeks to illustrate how this boy can speak through his pictures at his comfort level.

What inspired you to do “The Way I See”? What was your process like?

First, Sarah Peacock approached her to do a show in the Hank & Dolly Gallery. Mandie didn’t have much studio art experience then but committed to the task, knowing inspiration could come later. “I think God set up the timing perfectly. The show was in March and my thesis work for my MFA was all due in March.” For her MFA thesis, Mandie needed to complete 12 to 15 pieces, which would be enough to fill the Hank & Dolly Gallery.

Mandie had already been working on a piece about a young boy who experiences the world differently due to his autism. As a mother, Mandie wanted to elevate his experience, not minimize his struggles but recognize what and how he overcame his obstacles. Mandie believes motherhood (or parenthood) stretches you, especially when your child’s experiences differ significantly from yours. When you don’t know how to control or manage your child’s development, you have to turn to your community, be patient with your child, and, for Mandie, turn to your art.

Mandie contacted her friend, who is the art teacher at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI), so she could see how she teaches them to make art. What Mandie found was the opportunity to have her idea of art-making fully deconstructed. “My mind is just absolutely blown by the Image of God in these children and the value of their art, their experiences, and their lives.” Mandie was allowed to take some reference photos of the students working, and she learned the process of how they make art with tactile materials, which taught her what really motivates and excites these children.

Mandie also started to reach out to the people in her community for subjects and stories. “I have friends with kids that have autism, friends with kids who have cerebral palsy, and I know some folks from church. Once you start looking [the stories are] there.”

In your artist statement, you said, “perception is not limited to sight,” which the viewer should get from seeing the tactility of your pieces. Could you explain the process for making each piece?

For this project, Mandie starts by rendering her base image in Procreate on her iPad and Wacom Sytec on her desktop. Secondly, she prints the image and uses PVA to glue the print onto a wooden panel for stability. After that, she applies a clear gesso to protect the print underneath.

Each piece has its own originality. For some pieces, she pasted brailed poems from the ISB. For other pieces, she added decent amounts of modeling paste and acrylic paint to give the piece an oil impasto look while saving herself a lot of time. She used PVA to glue cords to trace the subject on a few pieces, and others, she traced the subject with Elmer’s glue so the unsighted could feel the features of the subject’s face. She also applied a lot more acrylic medium so each piece could stand to be touched over time.

“If these were originals, they would be maybe too precious to be beat up. The beauty of this [starting] with digital art, is if anyone who has who struggles to maintain control of their hands or their mouths or or something like that, may like damage a piece and that's okay. We have a space where you can be yourself and still appreciate art. 

“So if it gets damaged, we run another print. We take an hour hour and a half, we paste it all down, we do all the things again, and put that piece right back. It could take longer, but i've done it before, right?”

“We have these art spaces and they're acceptable accessible to most but not all. And I recognize we're limited human beings and not everyone is tuned into this. God is calling me to this part of creation and the kingdom that I want to cultivate as best I can. This is my garden that I'm cultivating it.”

In the Show, Caleb's mom said, “he doesn't know that he's any different from the others. And I hope that I can teach him to love himself just has he is.” What do you hope viewers feel and leave with after experiencing and interacting with— seeing, hearing, smelling—this show or even an individual piece?

Mandie says that viewers are encouraged to push themselves to see that there are different ways of seeing the world, and these experiences are not lesser than their own or others' perceptions.

“You have a big, beautiful brain, and I can't comprehend how beautiful and incredible it is. You may not have the same kinds of faculties that I do, but that doesn't mean that it's worse. I want us as a society to humanize each other.”

Her hope for this body of work is to encourage people to expand their community and develop one of inclusion. “God doesn't create people who aren't valid and worthy.“ She believes being born with certain physical or mental struggles is a hard space to live in, but it doesn’t prevent people from celebrating and seeing how beautiful the world can be.

What words have encouragement? Do you have for? Other artists who are trying to pursue art?

1. Just make art. Just do the thing. Get your sketchbook out just to be drawing every day. It's a discipline. You can't expect to be like a pro athlete if you're not exercising, you have to keep making art. 

2. Take risks and be willing to take big risks. You need the mentality of “I don't know how to do it yet, but I'll learn.” or “I don't know how to get there, but I'll figure it out.”

“You can do a thousand paintings and only fifty of them will be good sometimes. The rest of them will be something you learned. So just keep like making art and something will rise to the surface, then the rest of them will just be a part learning processes.”

Graduated. Teaching. Publishing a Book.

Mandie graduated from the University of Hartford, Connecticut, with an MFA in Illustration in July. She also attended an art reception where she displayed her work from her show, “The Way I See.”

She continues to teach and inspire the young minds of students at Butler University.

Mandie is actively seeking to have “Oscar’s Shapes” published. She would love to partner with some organizations to help publish the book to promote the disability community.