anne siems

"MOMENT"

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Gail Severn Gallery
400 First Avenue North
Ketchum, ID 83340
Aug 31 to Oct 1 2020

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What a moment in time it has been. A moment that is both a standing still and a stretching seemingly endless into time. 
Our time that has been paused, stretched  and warped. The time before the pandemic almost feels surreal now. 
How to orient in this new situation? 

Artists maybe have been dealing with it the best. We are used to and love hours of time to ourselves in the studio. We are not part of the hubbub of a busy workplace. Instead we crave the time to tinker, ideally without any time constraints. But it sure is different when so many around us are suffering in a multitude of ways. 

My shift from my almost naked , full-bodied tattooed women to these quiet faces, started before Corona hit us, but just by one or two paintings. 
Their tattooed messages, once more personal, had transformed to a meaning much larger. 

I had really wanted to stretch my technical skills to see if I could pull off painting faces, portraits at a never before tried scale. And painting by painting I got bigger, and curiously pushing me to my largest size yet, when within two   months I was asked  to paint my first ever mural. 

Working on the mural was both exhilarating and extremely stressful. 
As a woman , working with your back to the street in a neighborhood that has its rough edges, would be tense in regular times, but during the corona virus this was magnified, as folks would come up close, kicked down or disregarded my barrier material or were simply showing their disgruntlement at having to move to the side. 
Despite that, I would absolutely welcome another opportunity to do another one and let art rule the streets of Seattle. 

The painting Moment was the first done in the “Stay Home” phase and to me exerts that wonderful quiet with which the whole world was suddenly, yet eerily blessed. 
Everything came almost to a standstill and we could all hear birds sing again, cross streets without traffic and our neighbors that we had  never seen before came out of the ‘woodworks’, no longer tied to their desks or a treadmill. 
So this body of work holds this time of the endless Moment, of holding still and listening both inward and outward. 
More is to come. 

Anne Siems 2020