Christopher Andrews doesn’t remember drawing on the walls in house when he was a kid, but he does admit to the probability of doing so. “I’ve drawn, painted, sketched and been creative as far back as I can recall,” says the 55-year-old proprietor of Andrews Air Graphics. If you’ve traveled around town any, you’ve probably seen signs of his work, principally the exterior wall murals at the three Roses and More locations and the interior walls at Son’s Bakery and Café.

Although he never took the commercial matchbook challenge to ‘Draw Bambi and win an art course,’ he’s been studying and teaching all forms of art since his fun scribbles and doodles turned into commercial gigs.

“Growing up, I did a lot of pen and ink line drawings and then in high school got my first paying job with an underground newspaper in Detroit doing cover art and political cartoons,” he says. The talent exhibited in those early efforts won him various awards for paintings and drawings and led to a scholarship to Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio where diligence in his studies brought on more paying contracts from commercial advertisers.

Print this story Email this story Post a Comment Christopher Andrews of Andrews Air Graphics stands in front of his mural work at Son’s Bakery and Cafe.Stuart L. Mattingly photo ADVERTISEMENT

Over the years, he’s become a jack of all trades and master of most. His business card offers the ability to create murals, dioramas, vehicle graphics, computer graphics, fine art, design, illustration, photo retouching and airbrush expertise. He’s been teaching the latter for over 25 years under the auspices of Pima Community College.

“Many of my students don’t know much about art, but it has been something they’ve wanted to pursue since grade school. They frequently tell me that their teacher kept telling them to color between the lines, i.e., too many rules and regulations that took the creativity out of the genre, so they’d go and get a job and do something else with their life - but in the back of their minds they always wanted to create art. So it’s part of my job as mentor to inspire my students to be more creative instead of trying to squelch that creativity,” Andrews says.

Although he has had formalized training, he calls his ability to create a genetic gift, something inherited at birth rather than cultivated in classrooms.

“We all have a gift of some kind and everybody has a need to create in some fashion whether it’s sheet metal fabrication or oil imagery on canvas. I’m grateful I have a God-given talent. I’m here to express God in my art and I’m thankful each time efforts result in a professional product. I continue to enjoy the process of producing quality work and hopefully everything I do is better than my previous effort.”

Ask for a preferred specialty field, he hems and haws because his diversified background has allowed him to touch about every aspect of artistic creativity and he loves them all. He does admit that while he’s comfortable with a paintbrush, he’s even more comfortable with an air brush, a tool that has allowed him to make a living for several decades. Asked to name a project illustrative of a career highlight, he again hesitates before saying, “Hopefully everything I do is a quality work of art.”

Like many creative minds, Andrews subscribes to the belief that the project and/or the process is more important than the paycheck.

“I live near the Speedway and Craycroft Roses and More store which used to have an image of a little lizard in a suit carrying a hobo stick. It drove me nuts each time I passed by it and I was on the verge of offering to paint a mural for free.  Lucky for me that they called with a paying contract to create a nature-based graphic.  What you see now is my representation of Mother Nature, I think one of my better works because I was able to express myself and my beliefs of spirituality in that work.”

A bit more fanciful are the illustrations adorning the T-Rex dinosaur Museum, 100 E. Drachman Avenue—although putting them there was a bit less fun. “I used to use very tall fiberglass ladders on projects like this until a violent dust devil came through and left me hanging on to the edge of the roof wondering about the possibility of my own extinction,” he says.

Andrews plans to continue his classroom sharing of artistic knowledge. “It’s satisfying to teach others how to use the tools of the trade and how they can become extensions of the artist themselves. I make it look easy because I’ve been doing it for such a long time after learning on my own through trial and error, having to spray out many early-day projects and start all over again.”

Andrews Air Graphics

(520) 325 5126

chrisandrews2@cox.net

Lee Allen is a Tucson-based freelance writer.