Anna Steerman
Revelations

Runs from Saturday, April 16 through Sunday, May 1, 2011.

Opening Reception on Saturday, April 16, 2011, from 2 p.m. to p.m.
Museum Hours:

Saturday, Sunday 2 – 7 p.m.

Anna Steerman was born in Moscow, Russia, in the freezing climes of the Cold War. She studied painting and drawing at the elite Moscow Surikov School of Art under the Art Academy of Russia. Her study focused on classical training in the «Socialist-Realism» style. During the course of her study, She often felt stifled by the restrictions in the themes and required “realism” of the Soviet era of the 1980s.

In 1988, after immigrating to the United States, Ms. Steerman landed in San Francisco and earned a full scholarship to the Academy of Art College. Her fine art portfolio was evaluated to be above the graduate level in both the fine arts and illustration departments, prompting her to decide to major in graphic design. She gravitated toward corporate branding and package design, which incorporated her illustrative skills. Her passion for art and design has translated into a successful and award-winning twelve year career.

She has given her full energy to developing her fine art vision, style and voice, with the expressed purpose of telling some of the conceptual, emotional and humorous stories of her life. Her style has been described as abstract-surrealism, combining a distinctive boldness of color and the graphic impact of a commercial art poster. Her style is highly decorative and interpretive. Each piece has sufficient impact, emotion and complexity through which it tells a layered story. The pieces beckon the audience to strive to create connections while weaving in their own stories as part of the experience.

Each story begins with an energetic continuous double stroke – a thin solid black line, accentuated by a textured parallel interweaving line. This gives each piece its own energy, phrasing, and rhythm. The line, an ever-closed loop, is designed to entice the eye to travel continuously along its path and discover more detail each time. To the artist, color is the embodiment of the passion, mood and emotions of the story. The abstract language of the pieces is of an organic nature, which makes the elements highly interpretive and playful. Textures mix with colors to add dimensionality, in keeping with the graphic core of the piece. In the final mixed media and oil on canvas art, nothing is random, and yet the whole composition is fluid and full of energie.