Artist Spotlight: Anna Whitted
“Sage” at Whitetop, VA. All photos courtesy of Anna Whitted.
The Appalachian Preservation Project is proud to present Anna Whitted as this week’s artist spotlight.
Who are you at your core? Why did you become an artist?
Ever since I was little, I’ve been drawn to creative activities, especially ones that involve using my hands. It helped to have several members of my family already pursuing their own artistic paths while I found my own, as well as having supportive parents that wanted me to succeed in whatever interested me. I think I figured out somewhere along the way that if I didn’t pursue a creative endeavor, I would feel a hole in my stomach–like something was always missing.
We are all part of the same material, just living the human experience. I feel like at my core, I have a deep curiosity towards our existence and finding some meaning in it. I think that I have always been an artist, and that everyone has an inner artist within them. I’ve decided to nurture mine and see what happens.
How long have you been working with oils?
I fell in love with oil painting when I was a junior in high school. I really enjoyed playing with the texture and preferred the richness of the paint compared to other mediums. I didn’t have access to oils at my previous school, so it was a treat to be able to work with them in my art class when I transferred to Abingdon High School. I started off exploring portrait work, and a part of me wants to revisit that subject matter at some point in my practice.
Despite my love for painting, I felt drawn to digital creation. I went to Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in 2016 and entered a Kinetic Imaging art degree that focused on animation, video, sound, and extended media. I especially loved animation, and still feel like I could come back to it one day, but my love for oil painting never fizzled out. One evening, my friends and I found the time to paint together while we ignored our busy schedules for a bit. What we created sparked an energy in my bones that had been long gone after experiencing burn-out from school work. After this group painting experience, I began to explore abstract painting on my own–choosing a few colors I’m drawn to and seeing where the brush takes me. After my first painting on my own, I was absolutely hooked to this new, freeing style that I feel holds so much life and magic. I’ve painted a 12 part series, and many more individual paintings in this style since 2020.
Why did you begin pursuing art professionally?
I think every artist asks themselves this question at some point or another during their careers. Before now, there have been no good portrayals of fine artists living off of their craft. The “starving artist” trope has long reigned on people’s perception of artists and even artists’ perception of themselves. However, there are now many highlighted examples of artists and creatives not only living, but thriving off of their art businesses and showing others how to pave the way for their own creative businesses. In tandem with this inspiration, I’ve never been able to create work at this rate before, or found “my style” before now. I’ve gathered this inspiration over time and cultivated a positive affirmation for myself. There are always people out there that will connect with your work, you just have to reach out and find them.
What is the most challenging part of creating? The most rewarding part?
The true challenge is having the time to create as I work a full-time job. I typically just jump in when I have significant time to create, so there isn’t much hesitancy with creation itself thankfully. I find little moments where I can draw for 10 minutes here or paint for an hour there, and I constantly remind myself that I don’t have to create for hours at a time in order to make good work, or achieve a goal in a study I’m participating in.
I would say that the most rewarding part of creating is when you put all of this energy into making something so vulnerable and set it out into the world, and someone out there connects to it. It makes being an artist so raw and real when someone responds emotionally to something that you made, and interpret it in their own way. It makes me want to keep placing my work into the world in hopes that more people connect to what I’m making.
What artists inspire you the most?
It’s difficult to choose a favorite because I gather inspiration from a diverse range of artists. However, if I had to narrow it down to one artist, it would be the Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint. She was truly the first abstract artist in the Western world, creating abstract work five years before Kandinsky. I saw her exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2018, and seeing her interpretation of spiritual messages communicated through geometry, form, and color was so impactful and informative to my own practice. She created over 1000 paintings and thousands of pages of writing, and practiced creating work as a medium communicating messages from higher beings and spirits. She was creating this work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and she requested that her paintings not be released to the public until 20 years after her death as it would not be understood. Her work was finally released in 1986. I find her biography and artistic journey so fascinating, and I look up to her practice of communicating alternative spiritual ideas and messages through abstraction.
In terms of inspiration from other artists, I definitely admire the creative skill of the impressionist era, specifically Van Gogh’s use of texture. I utilize texture pretty heavily in my work–there’s something about seeing a thick brush of paint that adds an enticing element of depth and spatial awareness to a piece. I am easily entranced by the volume and crevices crafted by a singular brush stroke.
What life experiences inform your art?
Growing up on a sheep farm in the Appalachian Mountains, I was surrounded by an abundantly lush landscape that left a deep imprint on me. It took me years to appreciate the area I grew up in, and I tried to get away from it when I went to college. After about 2 years of living in the city and focusing on my degree, I was drawn to outdoor activities like foraging and camping with my partner on my school breaks. I just wanted to be surrounded by that richness of the woods again, and the blanket of quiet you can’t find anywhere else but nature. I feel like the mountains speak a deeper language than any of us can fathom. All we can do is try to interpret it and learn from its wisdom.
How do you hope your art impacts people?
When I show my work to the public, I hope that viewers experience the calm presence I feel here in the mountains. I hope that my work inspires people to hike into these hills and feel that energy themselves too. Sometimes when I paint, it feels like I’m painting an image of the feeling itself–there are so many elements, yet it is all one united, connected entity. Colors and texture may vary depending on where or what time of year I am gathering inspiration, but it’s all part of one ethereal space that communicates across space and time.
To me, speaking of the spiritual essence of Appalachia walks hand in hand with questioning existence, cosmic space, our origins, the human experience, our connection to natural spaces, what quantifies a “natural space” in the age of industrialisation and climate change, and how we are as much a part of nature as animals, plants, and fungi. These concepts are all lovingly entangled with one another, and I can only hope that these topics of the environment and themes of existentialism cross the viewer’s mind when observing the work in context. However, even if those ideas are not discussed while observing my work, I feel that the work is still meaningful. I hope my creations bring peaceful energy to those who allow it in.
What has been the most personally impactful moment in your career so far?
In 2021, I held my first solo exhibition at the William King Museum of Art in Abingdon, Virginia. This exhibition was the first solo exhibition of my career, and it really gave me a chance to show all of the work I had been creating in my current style since 2020. I showed 12 pieces I had created over the past 2 years, and it felt so cathartic to show work that I felt truly resonated and aligned with my practice. Before this show, I had been making work fitting criteria of an academic setting, which was good for my journey as an artist, but I felt so in rhythm with this body of work. It helped me take a step back and see my large pieces of work all in one room, and how the energy danced from one piece to another. I hope for many more solo exhibitions in the future, but the first one felt so empowering.
Who or what inspires you most?
Learning about the ecosystem of Appalachia and the sheer age of its mountains really made an impact on me as I neared the end of my 4-year degree program. Knowing that these mountains are older than Saturn’s rings makes me feel inherently spiritual about Appalachia. The feeling isn’t religious, although you will find a very strong religious presence here, but spiritual, almost magical–as if a barefoot walk through these woods is communicating with the earth. Appalachia was already here enduring the passage of time while Saturn was working hard, gathering her asteroids for her rings. Over millions of years she has fostered life–creating cave systems, fostering an evolutionary journey for animals and plants, hosting mycelial networks and interconnected communication systems among forests, slowly crafting and blooming one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. And now, during the blip of time that humans have been here, she provides abundance and beauty for humans that have settled in her crevices.
Something is so deeply spiritual and ancient about living and breathing in the heart of this mountain range, and every painting I create about Appalachia is an exploration of that feeling. I can never really pinpoint it because it is such a vast feeling, but I will keep trying as long as I feel this energy in my bones.
