My name is Anna Britton, and I am a 29-year-old artist living in Washington state. My philosophy draws upon the advice given to me by my art teachers as a child: the everyday and mundane is often more fascinating than the surreal and the fantastical, and the greatest killer of art is inhibition. I want to see beauty in ugliness as the expressionist artists did at the turn of the century. “Prettine
ss” bores me, and I would much rather someone say my art is hideous than call it “pretty”. I mainly work in acrylic paint, though I often incorporate soft pastels, charcoal, ink, and colored pencil into my work. I try to recycle household items rather than trashing them outright, and many of my heavily textured works have items like used aluminum foil (washed and cleaned, of course), cardboard, old phone book pages, junk mail, and unused wall paint samples. I also like to use old silverware and combs to carve texture into my impasto pieces. I try to incorporate intuitive stroke work and spontaneous color composition. I often only have a rough idea of the piece and I prefer it to evolve organically as I work through it. Expression and intuition are my primary focus, which is often difficult to harness after years of trying to pigeonhole myself into academic art. My artistic inspirations lie mainly in the early 20th century with artists like Egon Schiele (my personal favorite), Gustav Klimt, Francis Picabia, Oswaldo Guayasamín, Picasso, Edvard Munch, and Cuno Amiet, while also drawing inspiration from modern painters such as Barbara Knoll and Marina Gonzalez. I am inspired by the ugliest parts of the world without seeking to turn it into something conventionally beautiful. I often aspire to fully display ugliness in its purest form. On days when I am comfortable exploring the beautiful, I often try to incorporate a sense of loneliness and isolation that bubbles to the surface. My preoccupation in portraiture reflects a fascination I have with humans. I double majored in Sociology and Anthropology and often feel that I interact with society as a participant-observation researcher. I am often stuck in a place somewhere between disconnecting with the people around me and drawing generalizations between these individuals and larger societal patterns. As a result, I feel that many of my portraits reflect this simultaneous detachment and fascination I experience. I draw inspiration from Egon Schiele’s doll-like portraits in this regard: many of his portraits look straight at the viewer but appear to be looking straight through you instead. They are incredibly intimate and confrontational but also unnerving and disconnected.
