Ernie "Andre" Kirslis is a life-long artisan, artist, photographer, musician, designer and "maker": I enjoy working with my hands.. The studio provides an ideal setting to explore my painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and more using the broad range of skills I enjoy in fine art, woodworking, & design. My avatar is an 1851-process Ambrotype; a silver nitrate self-portrait on glass, fixed in potassium cyanide.

The creation of Verdigris Gallery in 2023 started the most exciting chapter of my life. I am a U.S. Army rotary wing aviation veteran, and retired career U.S. Government service professional in national security and emergency response. 

My work explores change and the passage of time, altered perspective, and meditations on labor, and human experience. Abstract landscape works emerged from a body of my photographic work capturing aesthetics hidden in material industrial infrastructure that transits our globe, incurring severe weathering and oxidation from exposure to the harshest environmental conditions on Earth. These works reflect human histories that invert the traditional scale of industrial photography, while showing scarred materiality and monumental beauty in intimate details. 
 
In addition to my editioned works produced with archival printing processes, unique oil and cold wax works unite photography and painting to investigate how layered surfaces carry memory, damage, and beauty. My works reinterpreting abstract landscape reflect on how global capitalism and man-made infrastructure leave material traces that become inadvertent collaborations between human systems and the natural world. 

My works have sold in the U.S., Canada, France, and Germany to private collectors. I co-direct Verdigris Gallery in Essex, Connecticut.