Anna Sadler is the originator, if not the pioneer, of an artistic direction, a form of visual psychological expression that can be called psycho art or psychological art.
In Anna’s art, the term psycho art is in no way only to be used in a pejorative sense. For although some graphic representations are frightening, the mental expressiveness of the drawing is always of positive significance. The meliorative psychological aura that her drawings or paintings convey when viewed are superficial. Anna’s Psycho Art is to be understood as uplifting and positive in its basic meaning.
Anna has been painting since she was 2 years old, surrounded by pictures and drawings that could be found everywhere in her parents’ house. Her father, who studied art in Strasburg and has been working as an artist ever since, exposed her to line drawings at a very early age. Especially the faces with a circle, 2 dots for eyes and a line for a mouth (like today’s smileys) quickly made her laugh and act on her own.
The emotionality expressed with just a few strokes led her to draw some herself. This led to an exchange of line faces between her and her father, which became increasingly complex. It also gave her the opportunity to channel her concentrated childish energy into creating small art objects. One of her early works, a portrait of her father, was created in this way. This drawing also contains the first psychological expressions that she used later and still uses today in her art.
She also began to be interested in the emotionality in the comic drawings from comic books very early on. Later, it was especially manga drawings that filled her visual world and led her to recreate these characters. Finally, she invented her own characters with an incredibly free ease.
When she went to school, she had to experience the novel “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding in real life because of the partly unmotivated and overwhelmed teaching staff. The sometimes traumatic experiences added intrusive thoughts to her mental flow, causing her to experience anxiety and self-doubt. But instead of letting these intrusions overwhelm her, she countered with her natural creativity and developed methods to deal with them.
The recurring disturbing thoughts led her to reveal them instead of suppressing them. Suddenly, horror film characters that had been smuggled onto her PC screen at school without supervision appeared in her drawings.
Anna was combative and dealt with her visions, which could increasingly be seen in her drawings. She realised that intrusions are also just thoughts. Using almost empirical scientific methods, she wanted to know what thoughts were made of and meticulously observed the mental space in which they were located. She realised at the age of 10 that her psyche could not be touched like an object. And although a thought was objectless, it still had an effect on her body every time.
Thoughts are therefore disembodied, but can still cause suffering to the body. The ability to observe her own thoughts helped her to realise that despite their appearance, thoughts cannot retain their form for a while like stones, for example. Thoughts come and go. If they come again, they are different thoughts despite their apparent permanence. They are built up again and again by the thinker and receive their form from the psyche that produces them. If I have no thoughts, they do not exist! Thoughts therefore have no existence of their own.
Anna had realised that she was afraid of something that didn’t actually exist. If you give a thought free rein, it can really run wild in our inner perception. From then on, she fought intrusions like a warrior and understood the rainbow property of her nature.
She also became aware that her “being conscious” needed a distraction from disturbing noema. This distraction was provided by her drawing creativity. Instead of following mental illusions, she drew these phenomena on paper so that others could see them. A mental illusion became a material illusion that is intended to indicate both thinking and representational unreality.
The material recording of psychic experiences (done, for example, by drawing sketches) became the cornerstone of her psychic art. Anna’s psycho art had found its creative outlet. Since then, many drawings and paintings have emerged from her hand, showing the different facets of our consciousness. Sometimes cheerful, sometimes depressive, sometimes despairing, sometimes healing, sometimes insane, sometimes sane…
If You like what you see here, you will find more art works from me on my Igchi artist page:
You will also find older art works on my Konscht artists page:
