Bio & Artist's Statement


Anna_1.jpg

Originally from the state of Michigan, I grew up investigating the natural world and the inhabitants of it. After two years studying natural resources and agriscience, I am now finishing a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My studio practice involves long forays into the Great Lakes landscape followed by periods of translation and creating from what I have learned.

Nature can be intimidating, full of information and detail. Notions of the historical and contemporary search for the sublime in the world are a major theme that draws all of my work together. The elemental fear found alongside beauty when facing vast immeasurable forces or unknown places is both thrilling and reflective of just how little we understand about the natural world even in the 21st Century. Where the pastoral meets with the wild, this dissonance is especially present. 

 I look to many other artists and thinkers for guidance and inspiration, including writers Henry D. Thoreau, Emerson, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Terry Tempest Williams, Anne Dillard, Walt Whitman, Christopher McCandless, and Rachel Carson. Musician Sufjan Stevens also deals with notions of isolation through the Michigan environment through his album Greetings from Michigan. Artists that inform my work include Peter Doig, Franz Marc, Jamie Wyeth, Isak Applin, Carl Baratta, Joseph Noderer, Charles Burchfield, Joseph Yoakum, Christine Sefolosha, James Castle, Molly Briggs, Emily Carr, Tom Thomson and the Canadian Group of Seven.

 My work has been described as emotive and relies upon memory, yet the situations and place remains real for its beauty and fragility and rooted in truth. I continue to believe that painting is still a viable and contemporary means of making art and expressing ideas. 
Powered by MosaicGlobe.