INTERVIEW: ANNA VALDEZ
The Californian born artist Anna Valdez has mesmerized us with her vibrant color pallette and twisted, yet near to realistic, way of translating the world into art. We took a chat with Anna to get a better understanding of her work and what methods and techniques her creative process implies.
“I’ve left home at different stages of my adult life; however I am always feeling the urge to return. A lot of my recent work touches on the idea of home or the domestic space. I believe it’s a personal examination of where one starts.” Anna is back in California after finishing a MFA in painting at Boston University. Before that she studied Antropology and Art Studio at University of California, Davis (UCD) where she focused on sociocultural antropology, painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her changing background and interest in cultural mechanisms still plays a major role in her art.
Laptop with Landscape, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 32 x 30 inches.
Plants and Drawings, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches).
We Like This Poetry and Music, 2014 (Oil on linen, 35 x 37 inches).
Utilizing art as an antropological tool
With an academic background in antropology Anna has a need for understanding the cultural context which she’s a part of. Through her still life paintings she obtains awareness of her own domestic sphere by observing and interpreting obejcts found in her own home. “Usually I create arrangements that contain all of the information that I wish to feature in a painting. I will make drawings from this set-up and look for smaller paintings within the composition.” Scarves with colorful patterns, various vases, drawings, artist books, notebooks and wooden blocks in different sizes form an almost surreal and enviable universe that we would love to live in. It might seem a bit too staged at times, but after looking through pictures from Anna’s studio you will realize that the colorful settings, which she depicts, is actually quite close to reality. “These items exist as a part of my domestic environment, and I have put them in my paintings to understand the domestic sphere as emblematic of both personal and collective experience.”
Palm, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 59 x 45 inches).
Zebra Succulent, 2013 (Oil on canvas, 48 x 62 inches).
New discoveries through exploration
Anna’s aesthetic style can be characterized by the juxaposition of colorful textiles from various traditions, insistent houseplants and lightly twisted everyday sceneries. Even though the consistency seems set, Anna isn’t an artist that dwells in a uniform working process. “I identify as a multi-media artist. I use various media to explore concepts and to see how each idea is expressed. I tend to rework the same image over and over again using different sizes, surfaces and mediums. This process helps me understand how to make a more visually complex picture while also making small technical discoveries through this exploration.”
References, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 inches).
Friends, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches).
At the moment Anna is working on scaling up her paintings and experiences how it both effects her process and what and how the work communicates. “Currently I am working on a painting titled, Cooking with Bacon. This painting measures 66 by 104 inches (1,68 by 2,64 meters) and is probably the largest painting I’ve ever attempted. It’s been a challenging piece because of the amount of objects and patterns in the composition.”
On this photo (click here) from the 6th of November 2014, you can see “Cooking with Bacon” in progress and how the painted objects now have outgrown the actual objects that they represent.
Cultivating Domesticity, 2013 (Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches).
Patterns, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches).
Picnic, 2014 (Oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches).
Keep working
When asking Anna where she finds her inspiration she again directs the conversation towards her fixation with painting. “My work is really inspired by painting itself. There is a certain level of satisfaction that derives from working out an idea on a surface and seeing that thought visualized.”
With a continuous and increasing flow of exhibitions since 2012, Anna seems to be a hard working artist and her advice for other creatives also reflects this kind of persistence: “Keep working.”
We definitely hope that Anna will keep working and keep putting her beautiful work out into the world. We are happy to have learned a bit more about the thoughts that occupies the mind of Anna Valdez, and we are sure that this will not be the last time that we engage with her and her entriguing universe of everyday weirdness and wonders.
Rikke Luna Filipsen (f. 1988) og Matias B. Albæk (f. 1988) er kunstformidlere. De stiftede idoart.dk i 2011, og udover at bidrage med artikler, interviews og essays, fungerer de som mediets redaktører. De driver desuden formidlingsbureauet I DO ART Agency samt forlaget I DO ART Books.
