ANNELL LIVINGSTON
I was born in Houston Texas. I grew up in a small town just outside of Houston. As a little girl I loved to draw and paint, and when asked, "What do you want to be when you grown up?" My answer was that I wanted to be an artist.
I began studying art in the early 1960's with Lowell Collins, who was the former director of the Glassell School, at the Lowell Collins Art School in Houston. Then I studied with David Hickman at the University of Houston. I also studied at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Art in Houston and I studied at Louisiana Tech, with Doug Walton. I also studied with other wonderful artists and teachers: Arthur Turner, Robert McCoy, Patrick Palmer, Charles Shorre, and Katherine Chang Liu.
In 1991, the time came, I closed the studio door, and faced myself to ask, "Who am I and what do I really want to paint? The answer was that my life was a woman's urban experience. The floor in my studio was concrete, and the sounds that came into my studio were from the freeway. I began creating grids which seemed to be the perfect symbol for the city. These grids were based on the square. As I drove to the studio, I would observe the light as it was reflected off man-made surfaces, and made notes in my journal. This series was called, Urban-Intersections.
1994 I moved to Taos, New Mexico, land of high mountain desert. It was a beautiful place to work without distractions. It seemed I had just figured out that I was painting about the urban experience, and how I wanted to express that. I move to a rural community, and what I was painting didn't work. I am influenced by "place," and after many false starts (the road for the artist is not straight) I realized that I could continue to use the grid, with the addition of the diagonal line. This variation allowed me to include in my thoughts the irregularities of the landscape; rivers, mountains, and sky. I based the colors for my work, on the colors I garnered from nature. My work is not so much about the external world, but finding that place where the external and the internal world meet; heart, mind and deed. I called this series Fragments.
I have continued to work with the grid and the series Fragments, became a series called A Day in the Life... I returned to the observation of the light. And realized how a life could be defined by a moment of the day. Over time, this series became a series called The Eternal Cycle; day into night, into day, cycles of the seasons, and the seasons of a life. These works are mono-chrome and the color selections was based on the observations of the day.
My new series called Poems of the Desert, seems to me to be a culmination of all that I have done before. I had come to the end of a series, and thought I had no idea which way to go. I was depressed and realized that the feeling was like the feeling about the "void, the wasteland, or the desert." I began to study about the desert, and realized my ideas wanted to be seen. Not what the desert looks like, but what it feels like as actual place or metaphor.
I am an artist who is in the studio everyday, I love to paint and to draw, and I have been doing it for almost five decades I have learned that "to be an artist," is a life-time study. Some of the reasons we keep at it are; the goal is illusive, and it is always just out of reach.
Some of my favorite artists are; Frederick Hammersley, Agnes Martin, Oli Shivonen, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Wayne Thiebaud, Katherine Chang Liu, and so many others.