Anne Siems

Biography

All that I see, hear, touch, experience and dream moves into me and finds it’s way into my artwork. I love faces, bodies, gardens, wide open stretches of land with small forests and fields, old things that have had a life of their own, stories and all the realms in between. What I paint comes from an intuitive visceral place. Elements that are found in my work through the years are there because they feel right: they have no specific symbolism. What you see is an open ended narrative, one that I invite the viewer to enter into and complete or continue.

Statement

In early 2005 I visited a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen her 10 year-old daughter in a long time and was really interested in taking a few snapshots of her. From these few photos a series was born. She became my muse.
I have long been interested in custom portrait painting as well as portrait photography and had painted a few portraits from turn of the century tintypes, but not until I had an “alive” person did the work develop.
Then I started to play with photocopies of my paintings and kitschy Victorian ‘paste-ons”, which I cut up and then newly put together. These collages produced the “bouquets”.
This body of work reconnects to my earlier work, where the female face and figure as well as butterflies, birds, insects, deer and flowers among others form a symbolic language. Dreamlike they speak of personal experience in the realm of psyche and spirit.
At first glance there is a sweetness and innocence; on second glance smaller imagery hints at the darker, painful, vulnerable and at times devastating elements, always also present in our lives.