In my professional work, I do portraits and illustrations. Realism (and surrealism) is my style and the human form is my specialty. I've included three of my more traditional portraits in this online area. The more hard-edged pieces sometimes cause trouble in public places.
The subjects of most of my personal pieces are meditations, demons, and dreams. Sometimes I use the archetypal imagery of classical themes to explore those areas of myself. I manipulate the images to create a preverbal version of poetic devices such as metaphors, allegories, puns and similes. Except in rare instances, my paintings are detailed and tightly controlled. Color is extremely important to me and I use it for symbolic as well as emotional purposes. Occasionally (every ten to eighteen months) I will paint a 'straight' landscape, mostly in blues and greens, as a meditation and cleansing exercise.
I'm attracted to the bright colors and hard edges of acrylic paint and it's become my medium of choice, although I do a lot of preliminary explorations in pencil and ink. Recently, I've been experimenting with digital art. I've found that the preliminary sketches are incorporated into the 'final ' work, and that there never really is a 'final' work (except for hard copies) because the piece can be manipulated indefinitely and printed at any point in the process.
Please write to Anna L. Conti.
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