Anne Nygren Doherty

I want my paintings to be more than beautiful. I want them to be memorable: something a person carries with them after they've left the room, that means more than they could put into words. My personal mission is to uplift and inspire others to live life as a journey of transcendence, and by making a subject memorable, it’s as if I’ve made it transcend its ordinary limits and expand human experience.

 

When I decide a subject needs to be painted, the question is whether I can make it speak in the language of transcendence. Most often the answer has been flowers. They are feminine, as I am, they are precious, and they lend themselves to realism, a pursuit I know one can never fully master. Afterall, even a photograph captures only a likeness; no medium fully captures life. So, I can go deeper and deeper into making a flower real and never arrive.

 

Years of writing, acting, and making theater taught me that structure is the key to the unconscious. Attend to the form, and the artist's deepest self comes through on its own, the more true to form the painting becomes. In painting, the more closely I render a petal or a shadow, the more of myself goes into it, in ways I couldn't describe if I tried, the more truth I capture.

 

Landscape is where the work is going next. Flowers are part of nature, and nature is everything that surrounds us. A landscape asks the same thing of me more plainly: what is the truth of this environment? Since you can't paint every detail of an outdoor space, you must choose the elements that matter, that are memorable. What I leave out, and how I compose what remains, is the statement.

 

I paint from life and from photographs, usually in watercolor, often at 20 × 28 inches, about as large as the paper allows. I want the work to hold a room and still feel at home in one.