You could, should you wish, email me at Or, perhaps, AIM me at andrewatkinsonii or you can send the regular old fashioned thomas pynchon-type mail to me at my work address:

Andrew Atkinson
Montclair State University
Dept. of Art and Design
1 Normal Ave
Montclair
NJ 07043
USA

This site is here to document my work as an artist and academic, two endeavours that many consider to incommensurable. I'm not entirely sure that I disagree but futility is one of the less noble reasons not to do something. Prudence, however, has something to be said for it. This seems to bring me to the conclusion that I'm hoping that my life will be futile rather than imprudent. Of course, this is assuming that it is not meaningful in some way, which I still secretly hold to be a worthwhile virtue.

I found myself in this position through an implicit value that I've carried since I was too young to know how foolish I was: namely that art is field which permits most ideas and allows me to study many others germane to it but not contingent upon it. But most importantly it asks, if not demands, that it is done beautifully and often with humanity.

This route has taken me through a bachelors in fine art in Bristol (UK), some post-grad studies in book-arts in the US in Philadelphia and, yo-yoing back to Bristol, into a so-called practice based Ph.D. This is a visual arts chimera often acting as a bridge between the study and practice of art and some other field or fields, often in the humanities or sciences. It involves the systematic study of a subject to produce a significant and original contribution to its field. However, this need not be necessarily systematic in the sense that is evoked by the hard-sciences, as it is often recognised that the arts are systematic by the definition of their own field evinced by the practices in that field. The same is true for the contribution. So that art objects are considered to be knowledge bearing in the same way that natural languages are.

My thesis was a study into digital photography and the Woodburytype, a C19th photomechanical process, resulting in a small body of work, and several variant processes of digital Woodburytype. Which, in turn, has resulted in my current position as Asst. Prof of Digital Photography at Montclair State University. But I have a life beyond that, right? Nearly...

I've been playing the guitar for over a decade now and wandered into Latin American music, entirely by chance, about four years ago. (I wandered into a music shop and picked up Jorge Cardoso's 24 piezas Sudamericanas because it was in the wrong section. Oddly enough, here it is transcribed online in tab form.) Lacking originality, I also have a fondness for world cinema and world music.