Preston Orr
Bio
In the months preceding Preston Orr's birth on September 6, 1968, he was nicknamed Armstrong by his parents. Before he was one year-old, a man had walked on the moon. Orr led a relatively sheltered childhood in Columbia SC, growing up playing baseball, fishing, and attending choir practice at the First Baptist Church. His mother played the organ at church, forming some of his first memories, and music was always present in some form or another.
Orr never considered fine art as a viable pursuit until his first year at the College of Charleston in 1986. His first college art course, "Avant-garde Issues," is probably the reason he remains dedicated to being an artist. Concentrating in printmaking, Orr completed requirements for his B.A. in Fine Arts in 1991. Returning to Columbia, he began experimenting with the use of fiberglass for making paintings and prints.
In 1997 Orr moved to Savannah, GA, to attend the graduate painting program at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he studied for 2 years. Orr continues to live and work in Savannah where he plays drums in a band called Pets and Animals. He is also a coastal kayak instructor and guide at Sea Kayak Georgia.
Artist Statement
"Art is like medicine - it can heal." Damien Hirst
For years I have cultivated the idea of my art as medicine. My medicine mends me in a social way. Sometimes medicine is hard to swallow. Sometimes placebo works. Without the arts, society would toil unsoothed. My aim is to make art that mends.
The works I have in the Halsey Gallery are just a few examples of mixed-media collage I have made over the last 9 years. In that time I have developed specific ideas on the use of nontraditional media in the pursuit of art. I tend to place extra emphasis on some material, beyond its ability as art media. Certain materials bring with them their own history, characteristics and limitations. This affords them their own flavor, conceptually speaking. Then I begin to consider the manipulation of different flavors and the ingredients of a work of art. The process becomes ritual. The art becomes concoction. Collage becomes a vessel containing media capable of curing.
