Anna Kline

Artist Statement

Specific places leave marks on us, they gnaw at us and they claw at us, and our lives are eroded by this tension between individual and place, and we leave these marks in return. I want my paintings to reflect this tension.

My studio lives in the room above the garage in my childhood home. I have been shaped by this particular room. My sleepovers as a kid, my dad working from home, my grandmother dying of cancer, and now my return as a painter. Both the banality of the everyday, and the intensity of tragedy form my relationship to this environment. I see myself in the dents I’ve left in the couch pillows, my reflection in the television, the stacks of paintings left around the room. I hold these images in my mind as I return and work within this same physical place. This process does not simply hold weight within my studio, but any space where I have spent a portion of my life.

Working between memory and direct observation I paint what surrounds me. Couches, the corner of the room, pillows, watches, and reflections of myself are repeated subjects, similarly to other observational painters who focus on domestic interiors such as Sophie Treppendhal and Gwen John. I am interested in an overlay of these motifs, and the insertion of myself into space as a way to reflect the relationship between the two. Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, the concept of the “flesh of the world and the flesh of the body together [comprising] the totality of Being”, informs my painting, in which the transmutation of myself into my home occurs, the act of becoming, because I truly am the place I occupy. My face emerges out of couches, and my arms out of my own eye sockets. The boundaries between pillow, couch, and wall are defined by flat swaths of color, and my approach to color is non naturalistic. I draw inspiration from Pierre Bonnard who chose his palette based on his immediate emotional response to a space. Reflections and figures reference the present, because the flesh of the body resides in the present. Many times the figure is half obscured by the architecture of the space which remains more constant throughout time and memory.

While these works are done on a small scale, their intent is to distill a large area into an intimate and personal connection with the viewer. By limiting my subject to the place I inhabit, I am able to dig deep into areas of my subconscious and experiences, creating intimate paintings that are meant to be seen closely and experienced as complete objects.

The body is not its own isolated being, but is defined by its reciprocal interactions with the spaces it occupies, and without this web of interactions the flesh of the body would cease to exist. This investigation into my own reciprocal interactions has allowed me to consider the ways in which myself and the world I experience are changed and how interactions with other spaces may affect my Being.