Artist · Chef · Runner
Pavel “Andre”
Kowlessar
A Jersey City native, at home across the New York metro — artist, chef, and runner. Andre makes work about the city that made him: luminous abstractions in pigment and metal, charged portraits, and colour pushed to full voice. He moves through it the way he paints it — on foot, in the kitchen, in community, fully alive.
The work
Working as @akpavelart, Andre builds across media — hand-ground metal that holds light like a held breath, and richly worked canvases that move from quiet horizons to symbol, figure, and pure colour. His subject is New York life itself: its faces, its energy, its appetite. Each piece is an original, made by hand, and collected around the world.
The work refuses a single lane. A serene color-field landscape hangs in the same body of work as a green-eyed portrait or a sun-bright metal disc with a single word worked into its surface — live. What ties it together is light, and the belief that a surface can hold its own source.
On foot through the city
Andre is also an endurance runner, and for him the two practices are one discipline — attention, repetition, showing up. He runs with Goldfinger Track Club, the Bed-Stuy crew founded by Coach Jerry Francois to bring fitness and wellness to Brooklyn's Black and Brown community, one mile at a time.
He's part of the hospitality-and-running community that carries the legacy of the late chef and marathoner James Kent — through the Crown Shy and 86'd run communities — and toes the line at hometown classics like the Brooklyn Half. The start line and the studio are the same kind of room: you show up, you commit, you see what the day gives back.
Where art meets appetite
Andre is also a chef — and the studio, the start line, and the table are one world for him. The discipline that plates a dish is the discipline that builds a surface: timing, heat, restraint, generosity. His work grows out of the kitchens and the chefs he runs beside — a city you can taste, made by someone hungry for all of it. Art, food, and running aren't separate hobbies; they're one ongoing conversation with the place that raised him.
"Light is the only material I trust completely." Andre Kowlessar
Follow the studio
New work, studio process, and miles logged across the city.