Andy Lakey (born October 22, 1959) was an American artist born in Chateauroux, France. He was best known for his 2000 paintings of angels, created between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999. He was a prodigious painter, focusing on original works and has been collected worldwide. Other subjects include hearts, abstracts (or "energy") paintings, imaginary creatures, portraits, and flora and fauna color studies titled "Brilliant Nature" or, as this work is collectively known, "The Unencountered," and minimalist works he began creating in a 2011-2012 series simply titled "The Studies and Paintings."
Lakey’s paintings can be found in private collections including the residence of the late Pope John Paul II. Among his worldwide collectors of original paintings and sculptures are three U.S. Presidents, national politicians, European royalty, top entertainment industry celebrities, prominent clergy, and leading art collectors. Lakey’s personal story and emerging career have been covered on nationally-televised syndicated and broadcast network programs, including ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America”, NBC’s “The Today Show”, CNN, Fox News, “Inside Edition”, “Hard Copy” and dozens of network affiliate shows across the country. His story has also appeared in People Magazine and other leading publications, newspapers, syndicated radio and electronic media worldwide.
In 1999, Lakey began to suffer chronic health issues from overexposure to toxins in paint, resulting in multiple and ongoing surgeries, and took a hiatus from his painting, while focusing upon other outlets for his art, notably the internet where he began to work in video as both the subject of a video diary series shot in his studio. Lakey also began to refine his technique after the onset of hand tremors, seeking to simplify his style and thereby discovered an increasingly "minimalist" technique. Until the end, Lakey painted, but wore protective gear for health reasons. On October 3, 2012, Lakey passed away due to complications after suffering a seizure.
Early years
Born Andrew Markivich, Andrew Lakey was born in Chateauroux, France, near the military Air Base and moved to the US in 1961. He first started doodling early in his childhood, always having enjoyed art in school.
After high school, he joined and served in the US Navy, and still holds esteem for the armed forces, donating works in 2009 to the military charity [ Cirra's Cloud.[1]]
Angel artworks By his late twenties, Lakey was working in auto sales, but in his personal life he had succumbed to substance abuse, and in 1986 he suffered a near-fatal drug overdose during a New Year's Eve party. Lakey said a prayer and made a vow to change and do something with his life to help people. "Almost immediately I felt a swirling sensation around my feet. I started to see the images of angels, and this sensation kept going around me, faster and faster, these angels came towards me and I felt protected. I wasn't hallucinating -- I felt my body dying, and as this twirling experience happened around my feet, I just felt a sense of peace." The next day, he quit cocaine "cold turkey" and replaced drugs with drawing pictures from his experience. In October 1989, on his 30th birthday, a drug-free Lakey resolved to become a professional artist. This experience on New Year’s Eve had made such an impression on him that his entire life focus changed, and he announced to his employer that he was leaving his auto sales job to pursue a full-time career as an artist, for which he had received no formal training or neither pursued seriously before that time "apart from sketch pad doodling." Lakey’s start was rough, and he admits to nearly giving up within 3 months, after receiving rejections from the galleries he solicited with his early works.
In January 1990, Lakey received his second vision, which gave him his direction. "It was a shimmering feeling and I was in communication with three angels, and they were feeding me information, some of which was about my art technique. That is how I started. The next day I began painting angels." The mission conveyed to him was that he would receive another visitation in the year 2000, by which he must have painted 2000 angel paintings, one for each year since the birth of Christ. At that moment, Lakey said, he realized what the angels wanted him to do. "It's kind of like a light bulb went off; my job is to quit drugs and to attempt to do something to better mankind, so I figured I could start donating my paintings to help (people)...” This was followed the encouragement of an art critic who had discovered one of Lakey’s works hanging in the lobby of a community bank, and within a week had Lakey on a local ABC TV affiliate on a story for art for the blind in San Diego.
ABC News commentator Peter Jennings, who anchored World News Tonight at the time, saw a local news story on Lakey’s art show in aid of the blind, and wanted to run the story nationally; Jennings also requested one of the paintings from the artist, subsequently donating it to the charity Lighthouse For The Blind in New York City. These events attracted media attention to the tactile, bas relief where the heavy, mixed media and paint is raised texturally from the canvas surface, and which remains a defining element in most of Lakey's painting and work to this day. Their three-dimensionality makes these paintings "touchable art."
When the agent of musician Ray Charles saw the ABC news story, Charles soon became Lakey’s second collector, quoted as having told the artist, “Please share your artwork with blind children and people all over the world.”. Years later on his charity website, Lakey responded, “I will always remember Ray Charles for the help and encouragement he has given me across my career as an artist. I thank him for his appreciation and his support.” In 2010, Lakey also 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 credited Charles’ influence upon his early career, writing, “I had developed a relief style of painting and Ray Charles was fascinated with the textural surface of the canvas and artwork he could feel with his fingertips. It was ironic that a blind man would take to my work - using senses other than sight. Ray Charles responded to my paintings with insights that were astonishing.”
Lakey made donations of early angel paintings to the Blind Children's Center of Los Angeles through actress Lee Meriwether, and in one of Lakey’s other early charity projects with the Murrieta school system, he received thousands of letters from children pledging to live a drug-free life, in exchange for receipt of one of the artist’s Angel drawings.
Lakey has donated many of the works to charities, aside from the many which have become part of private collections. Lakey's art studio claims that he presently has over 30,000 collectors worldwide, including celebrities, and notable people such as Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Pope John Paul II, Ed Asner, Kelsey Grammer, Jimmy Carter, Gerald & Betty Ford, Prince Albert of Monaco, and others. Since then, many of Lakey's collectors have also become the subjects of a series of portraits, a collection he has titled "Silhouettes and Shadows," and still continues to the present day.
Many of Lakey's collectors have also written letters holding claim to their lives having been changed through proximity and exposure to Lakey's angels. The demand for his angels continues to the present day. Lakey says in all interviews that it is all just “paint and wood.”
In 1998 Lakey completed the cycle one year early, 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 the collection of many smaller angels. He signed the final Angel at a public event in San Francisco, California, on New Year's Eve 2000.
In May of 2010, still under doctors’ supervision, Lakey launched a brand new cycle of two-thousand Golden Angels, using 22-karat gold leaf applied to mixed media surfaces, and helped to launch the first website featuring only his Angel paintings.
Other artwork cycles Since 2000, Andrew Lakey has continued to work in mixed media on wood and has also painted other collections; "One Heart," a collection of heart paintings, "Silhouettes And Shadows," special portraits and commissions using tracings of the heads and hands of his collectors, and Abstracts (also known as the "Energy Paintings").
In 2005, Lakey began a meta-category of artworks under the collective title "Unencountered," comprising flora and fauna (also known as "Brilliant Nature") and other alien figures and creatures that at times resemble hybrids of other strange fauna, such as flying piranhas and dogs with udders. In 2009 Lakey also began the "Unencountered Language" cycle featuring words and texts, before returning to his Golden Angel series.
Works in other media In 1999, Lakey began to suffer chronic health issues from overexposure to toxins in paint, resulting in multiple and ongoing surgeries, and took a hiatus from his painting, while focusing upon other outlets for his art, notably the internet where he also currently develops virtual properties for his many "Unencountered" characters.
In 2005, an 11-minute short art film "Silhouettes & Shadows" was independently produced by filmmaker Doug Brown, in which the camera treated Lakey's subject matter -- large mixed media canvases – as abstract landscapes, in which the camera would "fly-through" and above the surface of the canvas, surveying the heavy media surfaces and revealing how important a role texture plays in this artist's work. The focus of the work was the painting, rather than the artist himself, who is depicted in the final scenes while shown painting from inside a yellow hazmat suit, alone in his studio; the effect created is meant to distance the viewer from reality as a voiceover reads a cryptic poem narrated from the perspective of Lakey's Muse, composed by Brown, and uttered verse-by-verse in a robotic Macintosh computer generated voice, and set over an electronic soundtrack. Alternate versions of the film were produced to include a more "normalized" version of the English, and a Japanese language presentation. The film was released on DVD in a deluxe inscribed tin clamshell edition with postcards and a booklet.
Lakey's paintings have also been the subject of two art books published in Japan by Stepworks/Lightworks Press; "Angel Magic 108," (2007) collecting works from the following collections: Angels, Silhouettes and Shadows, Brilliant Nature, One Heart, and Unencountered, and forming a 108-page "oracle" of paired meanings and symbology with the great virtues, "Harmony", "Gift", "Release", "Possibility", "Challenge", "Encounter" and others. A second book for Japan, "Unencountered by Andrew Lakey," was published in 2009, and collects the Brilliant Nature studies, drawings and sketches, along with the 2009 Unencountered Language painting cycle.