We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Annieo Klaas. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Annieo below.

Annieo , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I think the most meaningful project I’ve worked on so far is what I’m working on right now: I’m getting ready for a show in Downtown Mobile where I’ll get to fill half the gallery with paintings of the sky with sun beams painted across them. Its so meaningful to me because I’m also in the middle of going to pharmacy school (I have 2 years to go!) and this will be the first time I’ve gotten to hang this many paintings together in one space since I had a solo show shortly after I graduated from art school in Seattle. I’m not a very systematic person, so pharmacy school has been a great mental workout for me, and getting to have an exhibition while getting through it has been something I count as an accomplishment and a source of energy. I’m painting the sky because a lot of times, when I’m overwhelmed with everything that’s going on, I’ll absentmindedly look up at the sky and then be taken aback at how much space is up there and how small I feel looking up at it. Looking into the sky is strange because it never ends. I paint skyscapes because I am unable to comprehend this infinite reality. Since a painting is a window into another reality, I like the idea of painting sun beams from another window onto this painting-window. Its like the light from one is reaching into the other.
Its also a record of the sun’s tracings in the past. During the time I’ve had to get ready for this show, I’ve had these paintings hanging on different walls in my house and so the sun’s rays trace different patterns onto them depending on where they’re hung. When the painting is hung in a new place, it takes a piece of it’s old home with it. When someone takes that painting to its new home, other sun stripes from other windows will trace their way across it, making new patterns…

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in Dakar, Senegal, and moved to the United States when I was 18 to study painting at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. I’d grown up painting and wanted to be an artist. I received my BFA in Fine Art in 2015 and stayed on in Seattle for a few years. I sold and exhibited my work in Seattle and the surrounding area and was commissioned as part of a team to create a permanent outdoor mural for InCity Properties’ “The Local” at 422 Summit Ave E in Seattle, WA. One of my favorite exhibitions I was a part of during that time were “Behaving Differently” curated by Elizabeth Arzani (Plank Gallery, Seattle, WA, Jul 2018) and one of my favorite solo shows was “What You Scoop Up of Me”, curated by Weston Jandacka, (Glass Box Gallery, Seattle, WA, 2015).

After that, I decided to become a pharmacist in addition to being a painter. I think visual art is important to society in that it helps people process things. Ethan Hawke has this great quote where he talks about art being sustenance to someone who is going through something really emotionally horrible-or the opposite, something incredible. I love painting because of that magical ability it has to exist in the in-between area that we don’t really have words for but need community in. Pharmacy is great because it is helpful to people, but a very practical way.

Now I am going to pharmacy school at Auburn University’s Harrison College of Pharmacy, at their satellite campus in Mobile, Alabama, and I have two years of school left until I get my PharmD! I was part of a group exhibition last year in St Louis (“Atmospheric Perspective” curated by Sarah Bernhardt at Intersect Arts Center, Oct-Nov 2022). Now I’m a getting ready for a show here in Mobile in January, and working on painting commissions for two clients, one of which is Alpha Supply, a business here in Mobile.

I have always been interested in painting the things around me that are beautiful but go unnoticed, such as the rainbows of color in an oily sewage puddle, or the fluffy quilts of mold growing on a cement building underneath a bush.

Painting the sky probably doesn’t seem like too far of a leap to make when you’re thinking about painting beautiful things. I think most people generally think of the sky as beautiful, even if they are too busy or just caught up with what they have going on to notice it. Noticing the stripes that the sun makes when it streams through your window and the shapes it forms around flowers in a vase might be a little more obscure. Another example of a series of paintings I made of beautiful things that I felt went unnoticed was a series of paintings of Chinese takeout leftovers that I titled “Pressed Flowers”.

I had gotten takeout one night at Cornish and when I had finished eating it, I noticed that the sweet and sour sauce had left an intricate pattern at the bottom of the box. When I excitedly showed it to one of my friends, they were not impressed. I decided to make a skin of the leftover sauce pattern, hang it in front of a light, and paint its portrait. I made five paintings of five different takeout box sauce patterns for that series in an effort to put that subject in a place where someone would look at it and see its beauty. The rich red color of the sweet and sour sauce caught in the middle of an opalescent white plane, the central geometric shape pattern of the box, and the light behind the skin all came together to create a striking, elegant composition.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn (or more like an ideal I had to decide to not subscribe to) is that art is better or more interesting when it is twisted, broken, or made by someone who is. I think the movie “Frank” (about the musician who wears a papier-mâché head) does a great job of talking about this. When I first saw it, I cried for a long time and I couldn’t figure out why, but this was it. There’s this idea that art is better if the artist is mentally ill or has gone through some kind of trauma, which can be a dangerous idea, especially if an artist decides they want to go out and find that. Art shouldn’t be good because of who made it. That’s such a cop-out. It is to be good because of what it is.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding thing about being a painter for me is being able to make the things I get mental visions of into things in real life. I wrote before about how a painting is like a window into another reality because it does resemble a window- usually, paintings are shaped like windows, they’re two-dimensional planes, and when someone looks at them, they’re transported away from the reality they’re in and to the reality that’s contained on that canvas just like when someone looks out a window. Taking an image or feeling out of my mind and translating it into something real like that has a quality that is hard to describe, but its magical.       

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.annieoklaas.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annieoklaas/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnnieoKlaasstudio
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annieo-klaas-08a97922b/
• email: [email protected]
• instagram handle: @annieoklaas

Image Credits
Photo credit to Sarah Coleman instagram @sarahcolemanphoto website: https://sarahcolemanphotography.com/