We were lucky to catch up with Annie Terrazzo recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Annie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Pivotally in 2020 I had the unfortunate trappings of watching someone I loved very deeply die within a few short months. I was 40 years old, in the middle of a pandemic but It wasn’t the pain of losing my loved one that created a terrible void that stopped my productivity. It was the fact that I reflected inward to see what I was artistically producing at that time, and in the previous years, and not feel proud of it. Not to say that I can’t look back at the things I have made without fondness and love, but the idea that perhaps I had changed at some period of time and the work had not bothered me immensely. Perhaps I was holding on, savoring for too long. Suckling at a wound that was ready to heal a long time ago. Stuck in newspapered room due to fear of being forgotten. So I stopped creating artwork and took a job as a theatre set designer, builder and installer. It was a world I knew very little about. It was a world that was very physically demanding and took skills that I had not mastered at all. I had never in my life touched a power tool. And I loved it… just learning how to build something in my head and how it worked or didn’t on stage. How to transport things, how to effectively manage a team as I grew in the position and started to have people under me. Having the gift of time, I see that my frustration with my artwork was that I wasn’t learning or growing anymore. It because route and so in turn it became unfulfilling for me to make. I spent 4 years in the theatre, and now I am ready to make new art, with everything I have learned and I couldn’t be more happy that I took the risk of letting it all go. Because it came back to me.
Annie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’ve discovered that I am most present with what is not here. My childhood was unorthodox and chaotic, having been raised by a mother who was a schizophrenic adult entertainer and a father who was a formula one race car driver. This chaos was countered by a family who, through silversmithing and plein air painting, taught me the value of and method to making beauty in the world.
After graduating from the Academy of Art in San Francisco, CA, I began a career in what I liked to call “trash portraiture”, focusing on using found objects, newspapers, and magazines blending with faces and bodies. I tried to create work that allowed the viewer to recognize image and text based language, drawing you in with attention to detail.
The past and the present, living and drawing, have the same kind of relationship to me – the one celebrating the other. With my new body of work that I have started in 2024 I wanted to take a closer look into my world with the portraits I make. My first project, DRUGSTORE LOVE, is an invitational art project to be completed in 2033,Real people I know and meet from a round the world, sharing themselves with me for just a moment that I can hold onto until I go on to the next. Secondly, my ongoing project entitled Pretty Pictures Won’t Solve Anything, shows a new unique multi dimensional layering technique for my portrait art, offering different viewpoints of the subject underneath.
Now, I am invested in making art you haven’t even seen before. Now, I am invested in making work that transforms your idea of what an artwork can be.
You need my art on your walls – it’s not decoration – it’s a call to action. Consider this is an an investment in yourself, not just a decor element, together we can fight against the storm of normality.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
With my conceptual portrait based art project Drugstore Love, I have set out a goal to make as many portraits that I can in 10 years, so the project will be completed in 2033. Until 2033, no but me will see the art. The process is thus…. I find a person as a subject ( I may not even know them at all) and invite them into the process. After we have a brief discussion the subject will sit for the portrait and I will make something. It can take me ten years or 5 minutes to make the portrait. And it can be anything I want, abstract, photo, drawing, sculpture, film. But my subject, and no one, gets to see it until 2033. It’s kind of a crazy idea, but in the last year of working, I can say it has taught me so much about my process and it is really, really hard not to show the person their portrait!! Why am I doing this? Because it it’s not easy and it’s not current, it’s timeless.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
As I was coming up, I went to a lot of portfolio reviews and artist critical groups. I wouldn’t go back and change anything… I see the merit in them and thought the advice my peers and mentors gave me was rewarding, but as I changed my work to fit into the world, changing it with other’s suggestions, the less I began to like my work. The lesson is: listen to what people have to say about how you can improve your work, and then decide what is best for you and your art. I was so busy trying to make other’s like what I had made that I forgot about myself and who I was as an artist in the process.
Contact Info:
- Website: [email protected]
- Instagram: annieterrazzo