Andrea comes from an artist family; her father, Andrew Menna, is a well-known watercolor and oil painter in Rockport, MA. Both he, and a childhood partly spent living in Concord close to the Great Meadows encouraged her interest in the natural world and art. As an adult, she returned to the same Concord neighborhood and finds that its proximity to Great Meadows continues to fuel her.

"My favorite medium is copper etching and this is where my professional career started," she says. Etching is not as commonly done by artists today as it once was when the great masters practiced. But she loves the physical intensity and mechanics of working with an etching. Creating intense compositions with high contrasts and subtle lines gives her the expression and mood she want in her subjects. It is with strong portrait figures, animals and nature themes she is at her best.

The conflicts of raising a family and being a full time artist can of course make such intense work difficult. In her search for media which could better absorb the interruptions of family life, she developed her talents for pen and ink, monotype, monoprint, oil and water color. Many of the images in this issue of the Concord Magazine are pen-and-ink, water color, and oil monotypes.

An evolution - or even a revolution of sorts - has brought Andrea to bring together collage and printing techniques in a new way as she works her many Concord models of nature. "Using what I call 'recycled art' or 'monolage,' I first create landscape backgrounds using the oil monoprint method (oil on glass substrate), making several successive prints on paper," she explains. The subjects can be floral, trees, ocean views, and so on. After careful study of the backgrounds, she looks for natural compositions within them. She then turns to using them as the raw materials for collage. She says, "The excitement comes when random events combine with the vision I have in my mind, forming something that couldn't be created with painting alone."

Andrea has had many one-artist shows and has won a variety of awards in several media. She's a member of the Copley Society, Rockport Art Association, Allied Artists, North Shore Artists, and the Concord Art Association. Her work can be seen privately (call 978 369-1875 for an appointment) and at the Barn Gallery in Rockport, MA.