Artist Statement
Storytelling is central to my current work where images emerge through narrative portraits, abstracted figures, and family archives. The beauty of nature, humanity, memory, experience, and dreams inspire me. My imagery unfolds from realism and my imagination. Painting, drawing and collage are employed using color to experiment with relationships, patterns, and rhythm. The craft of printing is used to hand print collage papers.
Working in series allows for a deeper level of discovery and understanding. For the last three years “Beating Hearts” has been a major effort. This series engages people in the community through interviews, and conversations. Stories, memories, experience, dreams, family archives, and identity are shared and put down in words and paint. Receiving the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant in Painting has allowed this project to go to Philadelphia to engage Gay men and Drag Queens for narrative portraits. The project has begun but had to be put on hold due to the Covid-19 virus.
During the pandemic year, I spent many hours in the studio experimenting and playing with materials and imagery. By June 2020, I found myself drawing every evening with gel pen and small sketchbook. I had no intention when drawing, I allowed my subconscious mind to flow onto the page, responding to each mark and image with another. By September 2020, I began creating paintings inspired by the drawings. These works became “Streams of Mystery”, a new series.
Through the beauty of art and the complexity of life, my current works explore the strength, courage, joy, dignity, challenge, love, trauma, and compassion that we all share. The stories can connect us in ways we never expected and ways we come to feel as part of ourselves. The viewer brings their own experience to the work as we do in life when we meet each other. As the tale unfolds these images show the ordinary with all its beauty, uniqueness, complexity, magic, and mystery that we all hold within.
Artist Bio
Annie Nashold was born in Montreal, Canada and grew up in Durham, North Carolina. She graduated from Duke University with a degree in Art Studio and with studies in Art History and Religion. She also attended Penland School for Photography. Cooking and baking became her first profession. She studied at Cornell Hotel and Restaurant School and worked in restaurants in Connecticut and North Carolina. Annie was chef and owner of her own catering company, ‘Annie’s Kitchen’. Annie left the food business to become an Assistant Slide Curator for the Duke University Art Department. After three years, she returned to school and did masters work in Landscape Architecture at NC State University School of Design.
As a volunteer, Annie founded ‘Into the Garden’, an award winning Children’s Environmental Education Program for the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University. For twenty years she directed the program touching the lives of children of all ages, teachers, and parents. The focus of her work provided ways for children to learn from and to connect with the natural world. During this time, Annie wrote and self-published ‘Native Tales’ a teacher resource book which explored North Carolina native plants through culture, history, and ecology. With funding from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, every fourth grade teacher in the five counties of the Research Triangle received a free copy for use in their classrooms.
Upon retiring in 2011, Annie began painting full time. She has exhibited at the Durham Arts Council, Craven Allen Gallery, the Carrack Gallery, the Eno River Unitarian Fellowship Gallery, St. Philips Church, the Watts-Hillandale Art Walk, and Urban Durham Realty to name a few. Annie has worked as a gallery guide at the Nasher Museum of Contemporary Art at Duke University. She has studied Botanical Art and Illustration at the North Carolina Botanical Garden and taught watercolor painting and nature journaling at the NCBG Children’s Program. At the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University, Annie co-taught a course called ‘Mapping, Collage, and Writing: Geography of Memory and Imagination’. Annie has worked with private students including those with mental challenges.
Email: anashold@gmail.com
Website: https://www.annienashold.com
Instagram: @annienashold