Discipline and Hard Work

Discipline and hard work. These are two essential ingredients to being self-supporting artist. Just ask Anne Belov. 

Anne tries to be in her studio by 9 AM every morning to paint. In her 35 years as an artist, Anne has painted landscapes, still life, and interior imagery. Her bold and direct brushwork results in captivating imagery that expresses the bond she feels with her subject. Anne says, “My paintings are about my life…where I live, work in the garden, sit in a comfortable chair to read. I refuse to be limited to one subject matter or even one medium. I have worked in watercolor, oils, printmaking (etching, lithography, and monoprint), egg tempera, and drawing.”

Hard work and discipline has kept Anne busy even with the recent slow-down in our economy. With slower sales, Anne decided to use her free time to push the boundaries of her creativity into new directions. Using Kickstarter, Anne ran a successful campaign to raise almost $7,000 in funds to self-publish a wordless children’s picture book, Pandamorphosis. The book was fueled by her obsession with pandas and her panda cartoons which she has been drawing for the past five years. She started a blog, Your Brain on Pandas, in 2009 to showcase these panda cartoons because she says, “My friends got tired of me chasing them down the street with a stack of cartoons clenched in my fist yelling, ‘Tell me they're funny!  Please!  Hey! Wait, you didn't read the one about the panda kindergarten yet!’”

Anne will be teaching a class on Egg Tempera for Whidbey Island Fine Art Studio in April 2013. Anne primarily works in oil on linen glued to hardboard. She uses traditional recipes for egg-oil emulsion rabbit skin glue gesso to create a more absorbent ground than acrylic or oil based gessoes. Subsequent layers of paint create the depth and luminosity that characterize her evocative paintings.

You can follow Anne on her art blog at http://nothingoverlooked.wordpress.com.