ANDREW DEMBINA
Keen on art as a young boy – inspired in part by a terracotta figure-sculpting mother, London-born Andrew Dembina graduated in Fine Art at De Montfort University, in England.
Freelance illustration, mural painting and editorial writing followed in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong.
While pursuing a career mostly in print and radio media for decades, Andrew also taught art to children and adults in the LAC and two other studios in Hong Kong, from 2001. Having attended life-drawing classes since his own late teen years in the UK and Hong Kong, Andrew has particularly enjoyed hosting the LAC’s weekly life-drawing workshops since June 2018, as well as teaching, and tutoring / mentoring kids from primary-school age to pre-university age.
Andrew’s own work is most often rooted in images, and sometimes stories around the human figure – occasionally using printmaking, other times paintings – but always with drawing as the starting point and often as the end result.
Andrew says about the LAC x Write or Die online exhibition and his process: “I enjoyed the premise of this art and writing exchange project, and elected to keep myself and my writer-partner anonymous, with no need for further explanations from either side – simply taking what we were given and interpreting it with no additional info. I received the poem called “Draw for Me”, from which I took certain descriptive elements to construct a visual montage that’s a bit like an illustration for it. I had handed in a chalk-pastel sketch of Mount Stenhouse on Lamma Island, that I had drawn in about an hour or so from my rooftop – I look forward to reading what it inspired.”
Find Andrew on Instagram: @andrewdembinaart