Andy Lakey
Andy Lakey (October 22, 1959 – October 4, 2012) was an American artist. He was best known for his 2000 paintings of angels, created in the middle of January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999. He died on October 4, 2012 in Temecula, California.
Lakey was born in Châteauroux, France. His birth say was Andrew Markivich. He moved to the United States in 1961.
After high school, Lakey allied and served in the US Navy and served on the USS Point Defiance in San Diego California. Lakey cutting edge donated some of his art works in 2009 to the military charity "Cirra's Cloud". He had no formal training in art.
By his late twenties, Lakey was enthusiastic in auto sales. He became addicted to cocaine, and in 1986 he suffered a near-fatal drug overdose. The next-door day, he stopped using drugs, and then again began to draw pictures from his experiences.
In October 1989, Lakey left his auto sales job to pursue a full-time career as an artist.
In January 1990, Lakey experienced a vision in which he maxim seven angels. The angels told him that he would have to paint angels, even while he had never picked happening a paintbrush in his life. Based upon this vision, he undertook to create 2000 paintings of angels, one for each year between the birth of Christ and the year 2000.
In 1998 author Keith Richardson wrote a stamp album about Lakey's angel project, entitled Andy Lakey's Psychomanteum, published by Ventura Press.
Lakey typically used a bas support technique, where the heavy, mixed media and paint is raised texturally from the canvas surface, This three-dimensionality makes these paintings "touchable art." Shortly thereafter, an art critic axiom one of his paintings and Lakey became the subject of a description by a local ABC TV affiliate not quite art for the blind in San Diego.
ABC News newscaster Peter Jennings of World News Tonight saw a local news story on Lakey’s art statute in aid of the blind, and ran the credit nationally; Jennings moreover requested one of the paintings from the artist, which was donated to the work Lighthouse For The Blind in New York City.
An agent of musician Ray Charles entrance the ABC news story, and purchased one of Lakey's paintings for Charles. Later, in 2010, Lakey contributed the foreword to the Ray Charles biography, "You Don't Know Me: Reflections of My Father, Ray Charles," by Ray Charles (Jr.) Robinson and Mary Jane Ross, in which he further qualified Charles’ influence on his before career.
Lakey made donations of to the lead angel paintings to the Blind Children's Center of Los Angeles. Another organization project involved exchanging some of his angel drawings for thousands of letters from kids in the Murrieta university system pledging to bring to life a drug-free life.
Lakey's works are in thousands of private collections, including those of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Pope John Paul II, Ed Asner, Kelsey Grammer, Jimmy Carter, Gerald and Betty Ford, and Albert II, Prince of Monaco.
In 1998 Lakey completed the 2000 angel paintings, producing the last two works during 1999 in which Angel #2000 (an assemblage 20 feet by 10 feet in size, composed of 200 12” square paintings) was a montage of many smaller angels. He signed the total Angel at a public issue in San Francisco, California, on New Year's Eve 2000.
In 1996, Lakey and Paul R. Walker published a baby book containing reproductions of 100 of his paintings.
In 1999, Lakey developed chronic health issues from overexposure to the toxins in his paint, resulting in combination surgeries. He took a hiatus from his painting and began to pretense in video, as the subject of a video diary series shot in his studio.
After 2000, Lakey continued to play-act in mixed media on wood and furthermore painted new collections; "One Heart," a gathering of heart paintings, "Silhouettes And Shadows," special portraits and commissions using tracings of the heads and hands of his collectors, Abstracts (also known as the "Energy Paintings"), and natural world color studies titled "Brilliant Nature".
In 2005, an 11-minute sudden art film "Silhouettes & Shadows", focusing on the textures in Lakey's abstract works, was independently produced by filmmaker Doug Brown. In 2006, his artwork was on display at a local gallery.
In May 2010, still under doctors’ supervision, Lakey began a new cycle of two-thousand Golden Angels, using 22-karat gold leaf applied to impure media surfaces, and helped to introduction a website featuring his Angel paintings.
The onset of hand tremors led him to simplify his style, developing an increasingly "minimalist" technique. In 2011-2012 he used this technique to produce a series titled "The Studies and Paintings". Lakey continued to paint, but wore protective gear for health reasons. On October 3, 2012, Lakey died due to complications after difficulty a seizure.
Lakey’s personal tally and artistic career have been covered upon nationally televised syndicated and publicize network programs, including ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America”, NBC’s “The Today Show”, CNN, Fox News, “Inside Edition”, “Hard Copy”. His report has along with appeared in People Magazine.
Lakey's paintings have along with been the subject of two art books published in Japan by Stepworks/Lightworks Press; Angel Magic 108, (2007) and Unencountered by Andrew Lakey (2009).