ANNA WEST | BLUE EDGE
February 18 - March 19, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 18, 5 - 7 pm
Racer With Red Cap, 12X20, oil, 2022
Blue Edge will be on view in the Balter Gallery, concurrent with Uncensored, an exhibition of drawings by Lindsey Guile in the Gillette Gallery. The Galleries at Garrison Art Center are open Tuesday – Friday, Sunday, 10 - 5 pm, and Saturday, 12 - 5 pm.
Garrison Art Center is offering a workshop with Anna West at GAC this winter.
Garrison Art Center (GAC) is pleased to announce Blue Edge, an exhibition of paintings by Anna West. This is the artist's first solo show at Garrison Art Center. The exhibition will run from February 18 – March 19, 2023 in the Balter Gallery. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, February 18, from 5-7 pm.
​
“For me one of the pleasures of swimming pools is being surrounded in blue warm water with a blue warm sky. It is water contained, not flying by like waves or rain,” said Anna West. “I can pick the light, the people or even the leaf I want to include on the canvas of water or paint. I can use distortion or sharpness to make more than just one point or leave it open for you to see what you want.”
​
West continues, “I paint in series, not just to study a subject but to correct or change what I have already finished. How can I paint something once, when I can paint it again and again each time seeing something new. Water, like fire, is mesmerizing, asking you to watch its ever changing surface, making it the perfect subject for me.”
​
Anna West was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, where she was exposed to both the rural Amish countryside and gritty industrial coal towns. Her father worked for the Reading Railroad, which gave her the opportunity to travel by train to Atlantic City and Philadelphia. The landscapes viewed through the moving train windows were like snapshots or snippets of film, and tie into the serial nature of her current work.
​
After graduating from nursing school and taking photography classes, she left Reading for San Francisco in 1980. While working in photo labs there, she was taken in by the glimpses into other’s lives, again, little windows into the world. She photographed punk bands and eventually played in one herself. Late in 1984, she moved to New York City, first the East Village, then Williamsburg, where her photographs were published in Brooklyn newspapers and exhibited in local galleries. She began to paint with oils on canvas in 1999. In 2004 she again got on a train, this one going to Beacon, New York, where she currently lives and paints daily.
​