CONTACT
anne.h.stevens at gmail.com
Please reach out about pricing for available work or to set up a studio visit. I work with art advisors and consultants around the country. I keep my available work up to date here on my site. In the Chicago area, you can come visit my studio in Evanston or see my work at Arch in Winnetka.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anne Hayden Stevens is a painter and printmaker living outside Chicago, IL.
I have an MA in Visual Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from California College of the Arts. I grew up in Northern California. Prior to coming to Illinois, I spent ten years in Seattle, where I taught drawing & digital media at the University of Washington.
My work ranges across painting, drawing, printmaking and public art. My work has been exhibited in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, the Evanston Art Center, the Governor's State University Art Gallery, the Koehnline Museum of Art, and at the Harold Washington Library Center during Chicago Artists Month. Public art pieces are located on Rainier Avenue South in Seattle, the Seattle Municipal Tower, and the University of Washington.
RESUME
ARTIST STATEMENT
2025
I make high chroma narrative landscape paintings about the intensity of our lived experience. The mountains and trees in the paintings express the scale and density of emotional worlds, familiar and unknown. The tiny protagonists are travelers perpetually in motion. The paintings are built with a roving perspective, rather than a fixed point of view. Parallel narratives can occur in the same piece, raising questions about whose story is being told, when, and how.
I work with a number of thematic strands. Walk, Through, and Clearing paintings center people walking and sorting things out; Philosopher paintings insert intellectual female protagonists into landscape paintings; and Narcissus paintings are about a female Narcissus who is in a perpetually fruitless search for water so she can self-reflect. Each of these themes evolves from voids I see in art history and contemporary landscape painting that I want to fill.
Early Chinese landscape paintings, California landscape painting, and feminist art are some of my teachers. Chinese landscape paintings (to massively simplify centuries of brilliant, risky painting) take viewers on a guided journey through an invented landscape. One of the recurring themes of Chinese landscape painting is exile. Steep and heavily forested mountains hold people venturing away during periods of political and social upheaval.
Mountains and clearings and open plains move through my paintings depending on our sociopolitical context and the progress of my own emotional work. The long journey, having hard conversations, and communicating the complexity of love are my current challenges in painting and in life.
2020
My work looks at the unwritten histories of women through landscape painting and collage. History and painting marginalize women. I study in these margins and make pictures of moments not collected in existing histories.
There are two avatars who appear regularly in my paintings: The Philosopher and Narcissus. The Philosopher is a character that surfaced in 2018 as I started studying Chinese landscape painting. The English language texts on Chinese landscape painting hardly contain any women, as artists or subjects of paintings. I turned to a women-focused resource, The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, and started reading the history of female poets, artists, writers and intellectuals in China. The Philosopher is a manifestation of these women. She does in my paintings the things that men typically do in Chinese painting: walk, study, and sit in reflection.
Narcissus has been in my work since 2016. Narcissism came up frequently during the run-up to the 2016 election, and I started thinking about the gender implications of narcissism. I thought about Caravaggio’s famous painting of Narcissus, which is a tightly framed image of a white male Narcissus and his reflection. There is some irony, and humor, in imagining Narcissus as a woman, struggling to balance her search for herself with the realities of daily life. My series of paintings about Narcissus and her never-ending search for self-reflection continues in this exhibition.
As my study of Chinese painting progresses, I am realizing that both these characters, Narcissus and the Philosopher, are ultimately searching for enlightenment. Our personal searches for enlightenment are life-long, messy, and usually unwritten. This braids these paintings back into my career-long project: making work about the beauty and complexity of our unwritten histories.
MATERIALS
My oil paintings are oil on gessoed panel. I protect my paintings with a cold wax varnish. I do not use any turps or thinners in my process: I work with artist-grade walnut oil as my medium.
My archival prints are large scale digital collages that remix fragments of my completed paintings with 3D models, photographs and drawing. I build the digital images as vector-based artwork so the collages can be scaled and applied to walls and building surfaces.
I love to collaborate with galleries, designers and consultants, so please reach out!