series-In-Progress
After completing my first full series (Held in Color) earlier this year, I felt the urge to take my studio on the road and explore Southeast Asia. I brought some blank canvas, my earth paint pigments, a paintbrush, and had to buy linseed oil in Vietnam after I arrived. The decision to travel while painting resulted from a huge personal transition that left me unmoored and craving adventure. I was pretty afraid of traveling on my own and wasn't sure how it was going to go--whether I would be too homesick or run into insurmountable challenges, whether it would be too logistically challenging to work on medium-size oil paintings, and if I would find what I was looking for.
After a couple months of slowly moving through Vietnam, I can say I'm no longer afraid of traveling alone, I trust that I can navigate all sorts of confusing situations, and I have an even deeper appreciation for people. Overall, this journey has been quite easy and fun. I set up my studio in my apartment and try to stay in one place for at least a month. I've fully finished one of the four paintings I've been working on and have three more that are almost finished--the first paintings in my second series. I haven't decided what they or the series will be called yet, but I know that the feeling at the core of the series is freedom. What does freedom look like, what colors is it? Scary freedom, peaceful freedom, exciting freedom. In this series I am trying to capture those feelings so they can exist on the canvas and be transferred to the viewer, whenever that person can spend time immersed in the painting. I believe that energy is held in a piece of art and that a painting can act as a "portal" into that feeling. Experiencing untethered, exhilarating, intense freedom in my physical life over the past few months while creating this new series has allowed me to infuse this series with the energy and frequency of freedom. I am so excited to continue on with this series as I travel and eventually return home to stretch these canvases onto their bars and see what they look like in their final form.
-Anne