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Anna Valdez

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Anna Valdez - Blue Shell Decorative Frame with Sea Scape
Artist Bio:
Anna Valdez (b. 1985) is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines the relationship between objects, cultural formation, and collective consciousness. Valdez’s artistic career began unexpectedly: during an archaeological dig, she found herself keeping a sketchbook in which she reinterpreted spaces, maps, and lived experiences. With an academic background in archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, Valdez received her BA in Anthropology and Art from University of California, Davis in 2009 and an MFA in painting from Boston University in 2013. She now works across a variety of media including painting, ceramics, printmaking, collage, and digital media. Creating epic tableaux in her studio, Valdez moves seamlessly between still life and landscape painting, collecting objects and making new ones, and cultivation, observation, and fictionalization. “I am working on various narratives that investigate my own traditions and history through a visual format,” she says. In addition to her own store of memories, Valdez looks to her immediate surroundings, family photographs, recipes, and “vague stories” for the subjects of her work. Recurring motifs in her work include patterned objects, masks, and veils. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR; North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC; Asheville Art Museum, in Ashville, NC; New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT; American Museum of Ceramic Arts in Pomona, CA; Cañada College in Redwood City, CA; Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, CA and New York, NY; David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, CO; 1969 Gallery, Alexander Berggruen Gallery, and Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York, NY; and OCHI in Sun Valley, ID and Los Angeles, CA. Valdez’s work has been featured in publications including Juxtapoz Magazine, New American Paintings, Artsy, and Artillery Magazine. Valdez lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Sources:
https://www.annavaldez.com/about
https://www.artsy.net/artist/anna-valdez

Anna Valdez Blue Shell Decorative Frame with Sea Scape, 2021 Ceramic, glaze, oil monotype on paper 11.25 x 12.5 x 1.25 in
This work, Blue Shell Decorative Frame with Sea Scape by Anna Valdez, is a ceramic frame decorated with painted shells that encompasses a beautiful oil painting of a seascape. The work is quite small, only about 11.25in x 12.5in, and 1.25in in depth. The piece overall sticks to a very simple color palette, mostly blues, browns, white, and a pop of red. The ceramic frame sticks strictly to blue and white while the oil painting within the frame is a fairly abstract representation of the ocean, so the color palette sticks mostly to blues and browns for the water and the rocks, and a small bit of red is used in the sky to show the sunset. There are also white highlights used to make it look as if the ocean was choppy and as if there are waves crashing into the rocks. The abstract oil painting with the thick brush strokes and limited color gives us just enough information for the audience to know that it is a seascape. The frame surrounding the painting was created in a way that is very organic. The edges are not perfect and the width fluctuates in size as it moves around the painting. The blue shells on the frame are painted quite loosely as well. There is a light blue wash that helps to create some depth in the shells, and thinner, dark blue lines to add some details. There are two very different patterns that are present in this work, the frame and the painting, but they complement each other quite well.

Perception of Human Impact on Nature
This piece by Anna Valdez depicts a white ceramic frame with blue shells painted on it, and the frame surrounds an oil-painted ocean landscape in the center. We as the viewers are unsure if this landscape is real or imagined, but either way, it is of important significance to the artist. The beautiful, limited color palette and the decorative shell frame give the viewers a way to see into the artist’s reality. Anna Valdez’s work often focuses on her own life and her human impact on places and things, and this idea can be seen in this work. The very stylistic and almost abstract representation of this ocean landscape is representative of her human impact on nature and landscapes within her own life. This can be seen with the beautiful landscape illustrating the endless ocean, yet this ocean is confined within a small, handmade frame.

Valdez works with both still-life and landscapes, and this piece is an intersection between those two, with the ceramic frame as the subject of still-life, and the landscape being the painted seascape. In another work of Anna Valdez, Shell Study With Decorative Landscape, she directly utilizes this ceramic piece as a still life study as part of the work. Additionally, the ceramic frame seems as if it was very impacted by human touch. There are indentations all around the frame reminiscent of human hands and fingers, and the frame changes in width as it goes around the canvas. This gives us an idea of how impacted the artwork was by a human. Humans aren’t perfect, and this organic nature is reflected in this work. This idea relates to what Valdez focuses on; the idea of human impact on the world. However, the bold brushstrokes of the landscape and the very organic nature of the painted shell frame complement each other and seem to give a hint of a positive impact, and a peaceful coexistence between the artist and the landscape. The artist is transferring their ideas and emotions into this work, and this is seen in how the piece was made, and the obvious human touch that the audience can see. The work as a whole is the landscape depicted within the ceramic frame is an interpretation of the artist's emotions and what is important to her and is represented in a visual way that the audience can understand. This piece is a welcome addition to the overall exhibition.