ANNA OLIVER
A small girl leaps into a swimming pool, wearing blue floaties and a fish-motif bathing suit, all the abandon of childhood in her face. The next day, she learns to swim without the floaties, moving into a new phase of her young life. Another child picks her way up a set of garden steps in a paper crown her grandfather made for her, wearing pink plastic high heels and the white nightgown she referred to as her "Nutcracker dress." A drink on a stump table, a book on the arm of an empty green wicker chair bathed in light and shadow, suggesting the person who has just left this "dream spot," as the owner calls it, and will, one assumes, soon return. The person eternally there and eternally absent. The cocktail glass catches and holds a sliver of sky.
As a painter, I am drawn to narrative moments such as these, moments that tell a story, taking a snapshot in time. Looking at them evokes other details - the soon-to-be discarded blue floaties, the crown worn so often it fell to pieces - beyond the frame, details conjured in imagination or in fact, just as the details of our most treasured moments are conjured in memory. These are portraits of loved ones and loved spaces, but not the traditional portraits of the past, a subject seated passively in a chair or beside a desk, staring back at the viewer. These portraits suggest the imprint of personality left on an interior space or depict the performance of small but memorable acts, recalling people in the midst of their lives. They are fragments of story, the ephemeral captured and preserved.
http://www.annaoliverartist.com
As a painter, I am drawn to narrative moments such as these, moments that tell a story, taking a snapshot in time. Looking at them evokes other details - the soon-to-be discarded blue floaties, the crown worn so often it fell to pieces - beyond the frame, details conjured in imagination or in fact, just as the details of our most treasured moments are conjured in memory. These are portraits of loved ones and loved spaces, but not the traditional portraits of the past, a subject seated passively in a chair or beside a desk, staring back at the viewer. These portraits suggest the imprint of personality left on an interior space or depict the performance of small but memorable acts, recalling people in the midst of their lives. They are fragments of story, the ephemeral captured and preserved.
http://www.annaoliverartist.com
