Meet Anya Spielman | Visual Artist
We had the good fortune of connecting with Anya Spielman and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Anya, what role has risk played in your life or career?
As a painter, my sense of the world has always been one of wonder and adventure. An explorer at heart, I often feel driven to take risks; traveling, moving to different states, and doing things in an unconventional way. A pivotal risk I took at 20, embarking on a solo journey around the world, still informs my work today. As I traversed, Micronesia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, I was constantly taking risks to navigate my curiosity of the physical and emotional terrain of a place: flying a plane off a tiny atoll in Kiribati; trekking through the jungles of the Golden Triangle, staying in remote villages; detained in India and Ivory Coast because I was a woman traveling alone; surviving a stampede of elephants in the Serengeti, and meeting a woman in Senegal who gave me her lineage name to greet her family once I made it to her village. I was compelled to really “see” the world in all its forms, colors and rhythms. It influenced my work, and I believe discovery and memory mingled with the actions one takes creates a currency in one’s career.
These adventures prepared me for the life of an artist. To be an artist requires risk. I have taken numerous calculated risks to balance my life, creating, exhibiting and selling my work while raising a family. I took a risk to have my children later in life, and to make them my primary focus with my art. I made opportunities establishing my career on both the West and East coasts. I find that my best work evolves out of new and challenging environments where I stay true to the integrity of the work, my collectors and my business.
Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
From the early age of two, I was mark making and creating; I was completely transfixed by color. I have always made art, it is in my DNA, my blood, my intellect. Painting for me is a very intuitive and intellectually rigorous process, one which requires a great deal of discipline. I want to record in my work, my thoughts, feelings and experiences, my interpretations of the world around me; the emotional and political landscape of our time.
In college, I drew from cadavers, and in conceptualizing the underlying strata of a form it became clear that the dissection process is linked to the painting process. My inquiry lies in this excavation process of layering and dissecting form and language – the strata of conscious and unconscious thought. The ambiguity of a shape as it evolves, it’s various substructures, intimate the tenuous balance between knowing and not knowing. Painting the suspension of forms distilled in color and duality has been a mesmerizing and recurrent state of mind for me. Persistent too, is a dialogue between stillness and extremes – what hovers there, blood and guts, despair, beauty, glory, human motivation and the natural world. For me, the potency of these tensions drive my work.
My process is very intuitive, intellectual and physical. The pure and raw alchemy of painting is in itself fully possessing and unending. I often work on up to 40 works at a time, (paper, panel and canvas) layering, and waiting for one to dry, I work on another. As ideas start to emerge, I will stop work on the others and/or focus on one until completion. Often the works converse and there is an overlay in some. Others stand alone, asserting their autonomy.
I hope my work makes the viewer feel and experience something profound. I have been told that my work evokes strong feelings in people, sometimes the work is even disturbing, sometimes euphoric. This is why art exists. Collectors have said that they feel my work is alive and they see me very much in the work, as if it is my skin and my soul. I think when one connects with a work of art and lives with it, it can transform you. It is mutable, it can wax and wane and you can also continually discover new translations on the surface and what is beneath the layers, how the painting interacts with your reflective moments, moods, life changes and relationships. One NYC collector of mine wrote a sweet note that all the paintings in their home were for each period in their life. I like to think that when co-existing with my paintings, there becomes a cerebral dialogue between the viewer and the work, the memory of time, space and relationship to oneself and the world.
Recently, the launch of my first NFT in the form of a collaboration with AgentC filmmakers, Lauri Levenfeld and Grace Wethor went live. The collection is called RESUSCITATE and can be found here: https://opensea.io/collection/resuscitate
Upcoming this June and July, I will be busy with shows, a residency in France and the 2022 La Jolla International Fashion Film Festival (see links below):
“Comme un léger contretemps…” International Painting Exhibition at La Grange Gallery,
Cernay-Lès-Reims, France (June 2022)
“CODEORANGE Exhibition,” Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (June 2022)
Artist in residence at the Château d’Orquevaux, France and recipient of the Denis Diderot
Fellowship. https://www.chateauorquevaux.com/ (June 2022)
The film, “Inside the Mind of Anya Spielman,” by AgentC chosen as an official selection of the 2022 La Jolla International Fashion Film Festival (July 2022) https://ljfff.com/
If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I would start the week marching for social justice in DTLA, lunch outside at The Hammer Museum, more art viewing at Hauser & Wirth, hang at gallery openings, dinner at Night + Market, a summer concert at Hollywood Bowl, drinks at Chateau Marmont, Huntington Library, restaurants in Highland Park, LACMA, Griffith Observatory and end with a drive through Silver Lake, Hollywood Hills, Venice, soaking up the architecture and gardens, that LA light….
Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My extraordinary parents who left this world too soon. My rockstar chef husband who cracks me up every day, my radiant teens who truly are my greatest works of art. My incredible and generous brother. My amazing friends who I am in awe of, and my fellow artists, dealers and collectors for their support.
Website: www.anyaspielman.com
Instagram: @aspielman
Linkedin: Anya Spielman
Other: Gallery Representation IdeelArt in London: https://www.ideelart.com/artist/anya-spielman Select paintings of mine are also featured on the following platforms: Artsy, 1stdibs, Widewalls, Artnet and Artsper. RESUSCITATE is an original NFT collection created by artist Anya Spielman and AgentC filmmakers Lauri Levenfeld and Grace Wethor: https://opensea.io/collection/resuscitate
Image Credits
Lauri Levenfeld (all photos except the one green and white square painting is Chris Bliss and the flower painting is Anya Spielman for photo credit. )
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