I am a fine art photographer whose photogaphy is eclectic as it's sometimes traditional, sometimes modern, but almost always colorful!

I am a San Francisco artist, deeply inspired by the beauty all around us: the contradictions, humor, connections and straight up gorgeousness of City and Nature.

This work captures the experience of personal challenges, delights, loves, perspectives and perceptions. Projected on this place from a crow’s nest in San Francisco. It pays homage to the eternal history alive in the buildings, neighborhood and ever-changing community.

The use of color and line to express emotion has been central to my work since I began painting a decade ago. For several years, I focused on creating straightforward representational works – landscapes and interior scenes, in particular. Over time, my subject matter has become more subjective and abstract. Starting with easily recognizable images – desert vistas, carnival rides, pine cones, leaves - that evoke emotional memories for me, I explore these images, push their lines and structure, and introduce color that expresses the emotions suggested by the image. I am continuing that exploration in my current work, using color, line and form to convey feelings evoked by my experiences – a cold Midwestern winter day, an arid landscape in the high desert. I am also exploring ways that color, line and contrast can transform neutral source images, such as snow or salt crystals, into something new, surprising, visually ambiguous and emotionally expressive.

10/10/12

Art is a VERB for me. It is an action word and not a statement, nor an object. The most important part of artist's life has always been feedback, either positive or negative. Feedback is the result of vital functions of art since any feedback is an evidence of existence, presence and growth.

Anna Seven

I started off as a figurative Illustrator and Photographer, but in the last few years I have been drawn more towards Abstract Painting, with an emphasis on color, movement, mood and expression. My favorite mediums are Olis and Inks.  I also teach Art to Kids :-)

“But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.”
–Alan Watts

“As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre

"He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with."
- Guy Debord

Generally speaking, the focus of my creative and scholarly attention is to sort out the ways that people relate to one another. There are 3 distinct states within the human experience that I struggle to reconcile:

1. Mankind as an instinctual animal, directly connected to the earth with all of
its’ flora and fauna.

2. Mankind as an evolved, socially conscious being, that must consider both
the individual and the community at large.

3. Mankind as a fractured being, whose constant engagement within the
sociological environment of virtual technology and mass media inherently
separates him/her from their physiology.

The purpose of this series is to highlight the beauty in the ignored and disregarded elements that surround us in city life. Although this series was inspired by my surroundings in San Francisco, the paintings are intended to transcend a specific time or place. Since moving to San Francisco, I have completely fallen in love with city living. I walk along the city streets for my daily commute. I travel everywhere from the Haight to the Castro to the Mission to Civic Center to the Financial District to SOMA to Chinatown and all the way to North Beach. I am always immensely focused on the textures, patina, grunge, decay, bumps and curves that emphasize the history of the architectural structures surrounding us.  And yet, many city dwellers seem not to notice the beauty in the decay surrounding them. Another prime element that surrounds me on every step of my walks in the city are pigeons. Unlike us, pigeons seem to be very in touch and aware of their environment. Pigeons inhabit every city in the world, hiding in plain sight on lamp posts, in building alcoves, on fountains and even on parking meters. These throwaway birds that are likewise ignored and disregarded, find refuge on these taken for granted structures that surround us. By utilizing the city as their personal playground, these “rats of the sky” cause even more damage, decay and wear on the city that provides them their only shelter.  But alternatively, one could argue by utilizing these structures, pigeons honor the architecture more than we do. This series of paintings is the study of the dichotomy between these disparate views.

As I sifted through piles of old sketch books, I came across a watercolor of Hulk Hogan I painted when I was nine years old. This crude painting had me thinking about my childhood, and my childhood heroes. It reminded me of dressing up in a cape, building a ring out of a mattress and pillows, and pretending I was the Macho Man himself. These memories led to my recent purchase of Wrestlemania III, which sparked my current obsession and the beginning of my new series of paintings. 

Viewing wrestling videos and documentaries first inspired me to celebrate and monumentalize those icons of my childhood in paint, but as I actually started painting more was exposed. Those characters of low brow entertainment were being painted into a world of high brow art stroke by stroke. The ideas of nostalgia, pop culture, and investigating subcultures fascinated me. I realized Wrestlemania may have been one of the first reality TV shows ever. An engineered drama that one does not watch for sport, but for the spectacle. Each character from the 1980's WWF plays a role, has a guise, and a unique persona. These actors were the players in my childhood drama, one which coincidentally is a perfect marriage of personal experience and my current artistic sensibilities.    

 This body of work is from a continuing series based on recontextualizing information.  In our current web-inflamed age, there is a level of over-saturation with the availability of information and images.  I experiment with ways to reorganize and reinterpret found imagery.  My agenda is purely aesthetic. There is beauty in charts, graphs, and other visual detritus that accumulates. My goal is for this informational detritus to take on new roles based on contexts and juxtapositions.