Today we’d like to introduce you to Annieo Klaas.
Hi Annieo, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My first memories of painting are from a game that I used to play with my mother when I was little, where I would tell her stories and she would write them in little books, leaving some of the pages blank so that I could illustrate them. I grew up in Dakar, Senegal and moved to the United States when I was 18 so that I could go to art school in Seattle at Cornish College of the Arts.
When I graduated, I stayed in Seattle for a few years where got to show my paintings in some group shows, create a permanent mural with a friend of mine for an apartment building in my favorite Seattle neighborhood, Capitol Hill, and received the honor of a solo show at Glassbox Gallery. Since then, I’ve moved to Mobile, Alabama, to study pharmacy at Auburn University’s satellite campus. My plan is to be a part-time pharmacist and a full-time painter. Even though pharmacy school keeps me very busy, I am working to keep my painting practice alive because it’s who I am. I will often point out things to people I am with and exclaim at how beautiful they are, but am met with unenthusiastic responses. I want people to see how beautiful these things are, so I paint them in order to showcase them. One example of this is the paintings of takeout containers that I made. I wanted people to see the rich red color in the leftover sweet-and-sour sauce and the patterns it made on the insides of takeout boxes once the food it had been on had been scooped out and eaten. I poured a liquid plastic product into my used takeout boxes so that it would preserve the sauce and its pattern, and then when it had dried and made a sort of plastic skin, I took it out, lit it from behind with a golden light, and painted it as if it was a still life.
Now I am working on painting clouds, using the beauty of oil paint and brushstrokes to emphasize their power and ethereal movement. I’ve started sewing cloth into my cloud paintings because I developed a love for the richly patterned wax cloth used in Senegal. In Senegal, people dress well to honor each other, and wax cloth is used for many of the outfits. Its distinctive features are saturated colors and bold, intricate patterns. I grew up seeing this cloth as a mark-making device people used to clothe themselves, and since I am making these paintings to honor and showcase the things I see, it is a good tool to use to describe them. Right now, I have a painting in a group show at Intersect Arts Center in St Louis, as well as some others at Lupercalia Art Society in Downtown Mobile. I’ve shipped my paintings to clients in Seattle, California, and Maryland.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been a smooth road at all! Moving from Dakar to Seattle when I was 18 was a huge adjustment because I am an American citizen, but I did not grow up in the US, so I was a stranger to the culture. To make matters worse, I don’t look like I’m from Senegal at all, so I think people were very thrown off when I looked like an American but didn’t really act like one. I left Seattle a few years after college to get out of a bad situation, so I ended up going back to Senegal, which is when I decided to study pharmacy. When I left Seattle, I kind of got a better picture of how expensive life can be, and so I decided to find a profession that would enable me to take care of myself and the people I loved along the way. I chose pharmacy because it’s such a practical way to help someone. I think paintings can help people by lifting their mood or opening up a new perspective, but pharmacy can help people in a physical way by addressing disorders of the body. Since I hadn’t completed prerequisites like organic chemistry or calculus at art school, I moved to Southwest of Chicago for a year to get some of those done and then did some more in Asheville, NC for a year. When I was accepted into Auburn’s pharmacy program, I moved to in Mobile, Alabama so I could complete my PharmD at their satellite campus at the University of South Alabama.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I had a great conversation with another painter friend the other day and she was talking about how the two of our painting styles were similar in that we paint reality, but we treat the painting as an abstract. I think that’s a good way to describe my paintings. They are inspired by the light coming through the clouds or the contours and color of leftover food scraps, and they base their details and composition off of those views, but the end product is fantastical because I want to emphasize those ethereal parts of them. The painting I have in the show in St Louis at Intersect Arts Center is a painting of the sky, but it emphasizes the pattern of the atmosphere and light rays around the clouds. I sewed pieces of cloth with complimenting lines into the painting because the pattern on the cloth fit the pattern of the sky in the painting so well. Besides, the painting is on canvas, which is cloth, so why not add a piece of cloth into it just like I was adding a stroke of paint?
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Instagram has been super helpful to me- I broke my yearly record of paintings sold in one month on Instagram! Since I’ve moved around to different places so much, it helps me to keep people in those places updated on my new paintings. It’s also been a great motivational tool for me- I am very busy with pharmacy school but I’ve made a promise to myself to post on Instagram every day in order to keep myself painting.
Pricing:
- The first painting I submitted a photo of is $400, 20×20 inches, oil on panel, and titled “Summer Solstice”
- The second photo uploaded is of a painting that is 24×48 inches, oil on canvas, $580. It is titled “Elevated Sky”
- The third photo is of a paiantig that is 12×12 inches, oil on canvas, $160. It is titled “Colossal Light”/.
- The 5th photo is of a painting that is 40×30 inches, oil on panel, $600. It is titled “Skyscape Inside-Out”. (The 4th and other paintings are already sold. That 4th painting is the one in the exhibition at Intersect Arts Center.)
Contact Info:
- Website: www.annieoklaas.com or http://www.annieoklaas.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annieoklaas/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnnieoKlaasstudio
