Secret Artist: Andy Dufresne – From The Shawshank Redemption

By Cojo Art Juggernaut New York, NY – Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Posted In Art Lab Art Nerd Artiholics Exclusive Big Picture Experiments Featured Film Firsts Global Pop Secret Artist

Some of our favorite characters in TV and film may hold down day jobs. They may be students, professors, doctors, or lawyers by trade, but secretly they are artists. Whether they say so on screen or not, it resonates with us. Watch as on the first of each month Artiholics salutes some of your favorite film and television characters for the secret artists they really are, but would most likely never claim to be.

Andy Dufresne on the outside was a young hot shot banker. In prison (and in reality) he is secretly an artist. He’s a sculptor, painter, designer, architect, teacher, mentor, philanthropist, craftsman, actor, and scholar.

His friend Red is a small time smuggler and gambler, but he’s also a sage, a philosopher, and poet. Had they met on the outside it would be one of the all time classic artist and writer friendships. They play off one another beautifully, and work to each others talents. They inspire each other, keep each other going, and pull schemes within the constraints of the system in order to make each others lives easier, more creative, less confining, and less monotonous.

They give each other the one thing any artist trapped inside a creative mental block (or physical concrete block) needs…hope. Hope that not only will they be one day free, but that they will be able to one day fully express themselves for the artists they truly are.

To Red, on first glance Andy looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over. A “tall drink of water with the silver spoon up his ass.” From his fresh fish appearance Red thought Andy would crack-up and cry his first night in Shawshank. He was wrong:

“The first night in the joint Andy Dufresne cost me two packs of cigarettes, he never made a sound.” - Red

The perception of Andy among the inmates was the same perception many introverted self doubting, self conscious artists probably are pegged with at first glance. Andy kept to himself, he was quiet, “a cold fish”, and also like most artists people believed that he thought “his shit smelled sweeter than most.”

GEOLOGIST & ROCK HOUND:
The first time Andy approached anyone to have a conversation was when he spoke to Red in hopes of acquiring a rock hammer to carve some stone. To prove to Red that he wasn’t looking to murder anyone with it he started identifying rocks that were laying on the grounds of the exercise yard “quarts, some mica, shale, limestone.”

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