In this phase of my life I have chosen to work primarily on paper; painting and drawing.  I work in a traditional watercolor method; I wet and reclaim the paper, create the underpainting,  and then carefully I add the finish to the work.  I have been seriously working with grids since the early nineties.  When I lived in Houston I created grids made up of only squares.  I thought of the grid as a metaphor for the urban experience.  My studio was downtown, the sounds that came into my studio were sounds of trucks, buses and cars; the sounds from the freeway.  The work was based on the observation of the 'light' in the city, reflected off of man-made materials.

 

Upon moving to Taos, New Mexico, it was the addition of the random diagonal line, which creates compositions of squares, triangles, and some unexpected shapes.  It is the diagonal line which allows me to think of the landscape of New Mexico; rivers, mountains, and sky.  It is not that I expect the viewer to see what I see, but it is to explain where my inspiration comes from. 

 

 

 

 

A form can signify an event.

Taos-based artist, Annell Livingston creates paintings with a deeply meditative, spiritual quality. Her paintings, like life itself, are basically the same: square paintings (or long rectangular paintings) of small, ordered grids of squares, triangles, and unexpected shapes. The patterns vary little — whether executed in encaustic on board or canvas, acrylic on oriental paper, or gouache on paper. All the while, they quietly reflect the rhythm of the changing light in the artist’s Taos, New Mexico studio.

The works are a visual response to the artist’s reflections on day and night, the sameness, the change and the inevitability of their progressions. They put in mind the works of Agnes Martin, but they obviously are done free-hand, unlike Martin’s penciled-straight edge-perfect stripes, and with the small imperceptible variations from square to square lays a huge difference. Each square, with each visible stroke is a kind of prayer. In her statement the artist quotes the famous Rapist (Trappist) monk Thomas Merton: “If you let the hours of the day saturate you, and you give them time, something would happen…”