Anne Emerson - 'Sinking Into Nature'

Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, November 5th from 12-2PM. Refreshments will be served!
 About the artist:
"I am a painter and a writer and the two actions seem to me to feed each other, opening me to see the world simultaneously in light and metaphor. I paint what pleases me and what moves me. My paintings are of people, things and places I love and most of my paintings have personal historical references. The act of painting is a meditation for me, awakening me to “all this joy and beauty,” in the words of my grandmother’s favorite prayer. In a way, my painting is also an act of longing. It is an effort to capture and hold the extraordinary feeling of being held in a natural place or emotion, suspended in beauty, power, solitude, and light. I learned to paint by studying with individual artists that I admired rather than going to art school. So I never took the course on how to write an artist statement. During the last fourteen years that I’ve been painting, I’ve also been working on being more fully present, less distracted by random thoughts. It’s interesting to me how “presence” opens up and closes down and how we can gradually with practice learn to be more “present.” The pandemic really gave me a lot of time to practice this! When I walk in nature, which I do every day, often in the Arnold Arboretum, I think about “sinking in,” almost dissolving myself into the beauty of it all. And, of course, that is what I most want to my paintings to do to a viewer: to allow them to sink in to that moment that’s in the painting, and banish all those distracting thoughts In the past several years, I have worked mostly in pastel, a medium which is having a renaissance. I love its luminous quality and the fact that you work with four hundred different colors and pastel sticks. I find it suits my need to work quickly and expressively and allows me to go back and refine at my own pace.
I paint both plein air and in my studio from my own photographs. I generally paint in a series. As I spend much of my summer in East Penobscot Bay in Maine, I paint local subjects while there, often doing the same subject each year. I take workshops throughout the year and I go to the International Pastel Association Biannual meeting in Albuquerque, attending their workshops and demos of the world’s best pastel artists while I’m there. It is rewarding to add to my repertoire of techniques and see them reflected as I paint the same subjects again. I also do a lot of international travel and always take my pastels, so I have paintings in a wide variety of subjects from cityscapes of Havana, Paris and Venice, to elephants in South Africa.
I am pleased to be a member of the Copley Society and the North Shore Art Association and to have had a solo show in Paris in 2020."