Anna Contes
As a painter, I seek to capture the sensation of color and the structure of light energy. Objects reflect and radiate a light force of their own – transparent yet solidly structured planes of color imbued with light. Nature’s forms release me only after her sensuality is expressed. An iconic symbolism emerges that satisfies me until my next encounter.
Bio
A New Yorker by birth, as a teenager, I escaped to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with my bagged lunch, every Saturday morning for several months of each high school year. At sixteen, I enjoyed a painting scholarship from the American Art School, in NYC, then went on to receive a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY, and an M.S. at SUNY New Paltz. At The Edwin MacDowell Art Colony, in Peterborough, NH, I was awarded a summer painting fellowship.
As an artist, my reality is a pulsation of color vibrations. To translate this, I formulated my own hand made, fade proof, non-toxic pastels. My research in pure pigment came from working in traditional egg tempera as a Greek Orthodox Church iconographer and muralist, in the Byzantine style. Pastels require that one think in color since each color choice is made separately.
My present materials are oil paint and oil paint stick, but my focus continues to be on color.
Presently, I paint out of my Woodstock studio and travel often into NYC and abroad to Greece. I believe in teaching drawing through color; my modeling tool and have done so with pastel for at least twenty four years in my summer workshops at the Woodstock School of Art, where I concentrated on the figure, still life and the landscape from direct observation.