Anna Stiritz

A piece begins with a dropper of ink or a handful of coffee crystals thrown on the paper. When a spray of water hits these dark elements, they bloom and transform. The piece starts to open up and makes me ask questions: What is this? What have I started here? If there is trouble already, can this be salvaged? What am I going to cover up, and what am I going to reveal?

I think of each abstract as a transcription of a conversation between me and the piece. It begins with the questions. Then I address the paper, working with darks and  lights in a tightly limited palette. After everything seems comfortably situated, the piece asks me, what does this mean? At that point I turn to my thrift store hymnals, Dick and Jane textbooks, and personal letters to look for the message which inevitably leaps out to catch my attention. When I add text to the work, its purpose emerges—to challenge, comfort, tease, mystify, or explain. 

Artist Bio

Anna Stiritz lives and paints in Russellville, Arkansas. A mother of five and attorney by trade, she is self-taught but always inspired by the creative efforts around and before her. Her first venture was watercolor, where she realized that an unsuccessful composition could be cut apart and the “good parts” re-imagined as a collage. She sold her collage work widely for several years. Then in 2015, after a fifteen-year hiatus, she picked up some oil paints and a palette knife and never looked back. Embracing a free-handed, lively style, she is a prolific palette knife painter of florals, loves to explore imagery from sharecroppers’ lives and homes, and has created a series inspired by the black-and-white photography of polar exploration. Her work at Boswell is a range of joyous, playful, and thought-provoking mixed media abstracts.