Painting or drawing portraits is interesting to Anna for both artistic and personal reasons.
Making portraits allows Anna to capture the unique expressions and emotions of individuals. As the face is a powerful communicator of feelings, Anna can show a wide range of emotions through facial expressions, body language and gaze.
Creating a portrait is about engaging with the subject on a personal level. Usually, the process often involves spending time with the person, getting to know them and understanding their personality. It is this human connection that gives the artwork a certain honesty.
However, most of her portraits are not real people, but apparitions that she can only see in her imagination. One of the talents that Anna has developed is to materialize these portraits for other people that arise from her imagination.
Portrait drawings painted from real people are technically very demanding and require a high degree of skill in capturing likenesses, proportions and details. Most artists often enjoy the challenge of honing their technical skills to accurately portray a person’s features.
But Anna’s Portraits are non-existent persons. It is even more challenging to bring the portraits that emerge from nothing to life in a credible way in the form of drawings or paintings.
In this way, Anna is able to use the portraits to tell stories about her inner life, experiences and personalities with inner motives. Some portraits are surrounded by symbolic elements or contextual details that provide insights into their search for inner identities.
Like an exploratory artist, she searches for the concept of identities that emerge through facial features and forms. As if it were a means of self-expression, with her own feelings or interpretations that can thus be projected onto paper or canvas.
Sometimes this results in portraits that are brought to life as a hidden internal mirror. Or they are inner witnesses of the inner conflict with social norms, cultural diversity or individual uniqueness that emerge in this way.
Sometimes she also questions beauty standards with her portraits. She then, for pure aesthetic pleasure, paints an inner world of people who don’t necessarily follow the norms of our society. Since the human face is often viewed as aesthetically pleasing, Anna believes that capturing its beauty does not necessarily correspond to a general sense of beauty. The inner portraits then only serve to explore color, texture and form in the context of the human face as an aesthetic exploration.
Her invented portraits have the potential to create a personal connection between the artwork and the viewer. And although they do not exist in reality, they are relatable as true portraits. Some of her well-executed portraits evoke emotion, empathy or even a sense of familiarity.