About - Artist Art & Process

A r t i s t

I‘m blessed with two muses; both of them are nags and both say they have my best interests at heart. One is a hefty operatic Brunhilde who sneers at my reclusive nature and stomps critics like grapes. The other (see image) is a Berserker Muse of Scandinavian descent who wears candles on her head and has an unholy madness in her eyes. I suspect the Berserker moved in the day my 7th grade teacher called my Mother and, holding up my latest colorful landscape, told Mom that I was either a genius, or disturbed. She stressed the word “disturbed.” What could my mother reply but, “No, no, art is only Ann’s little hobby.” Emphasis on “Hobby.” Since I had to stand there being discussed, and seeing that my family really did hope it was a hobby, I decided it was time for my art to go underground and I switched to my other talent, writing. In college I studied theater with an emphasis on play writing and directing. I especially loved dark, absurdist plays, and tried to write them. Dutifully, my family came to see my efforts.

Fortunately, the parameters for abnormal behavior are not as rigid and narrowly defined today. (I think boys sniffing glue in my 7th grade art class should have had their mothers called to school.) Long story short, I picked up my art career after I was married with kids. What else can you do with kids but paint around them, occasionally clearing my art materials off the kitchen table to make way for meals? Basically, I built a successful thirty-year art career by teaching myself everything and had a lot of fun doing it. It wasn’t until I picked up a copy of Raw Vision magazine at the local bookstore five years ago, however, that I connected all the dots and realized I’d been an outsider artist (outsider art is also referred to as Art Brut or Folk Art) all those years, or rather insider/outsider, since I’d always been aware of “mainstream” artists. I was drawn to both Primitive art and Abstract Expressionism.

Most of the pen and ink drawings on this web site emerged about the same time I began writing poetry; and if it hadn’t been for my computer-genius son Matthew, they’d be gathering mold on my studio walls. I hope they resonate and have meaning for viewers because I have difficulty articulating what I think. I don’t know what layer of the subconscious I’ve tapped into, but many passionate, long-buried feeling seem to be creeping to the surface, and it’s difficult naming them.

Obviously, technique is the least of my considerations with these recent drawings. Some of them qualify as scribble art. Some of them look like the product of an obsessive/compulsive individual.

I begin the drawings peacefully enough, however, sitting in my favorite chair, a recliner, with blank paper and pen in hand, waiting for some soft mysterious entrance cue. Then I lay down a few gestural lines with no clear objective in mind, (except for elephants, fish, and dogs.) If the gestural lines connect with something within me, the drawing just comes. One image develops out of another, and sometimes I leave an earlier image in, but draw over part of in, so it looks like a ghost-image. This experience happens a lot because, frequently, these drawings take five hours or more to complete. When they take this long, I enter a real meditative state, but I’m acutely aware of lots of passionate feelings as well. They drift through my brain like clouds, some lazy drifters, some dark thunderheads.

I thank my family for their support and thank my friends who have hung my work on their walls all these years. Finally, I know there will be people who see my work as just cartoons on helium, so here I confess my indebtedness to the great cartoonists: Thurber, Stine, Sendak and Wilson. And I thank my brother Bill for all those years he spent sharing his Mad Magazine collection with his little sister.

I’m going to draw until the cows come home, or my Berserker Muse runs out of candles.

Ann Wright, Davis California