We were lucky to catch up with Alanna Dunn recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Alanna thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

As a child, I always gravitated towards creating things. I started painting at a very young age and never stopped. When I was younger, my mom would buy large sheets of paper and cover our dining room table with them and I would paint with watercolors. I was always busy making something with my hands. It’s this driving force that has always called me to doing something in the arts. I don’t know if I ever had a key moment of knowing exactly what I would be doing in the arts but I always knew I would be making art. When I received my MFA that was the moment where I really started thinking of myself as an artist. I feel very fortunate because I love teaching art and am currently employed as an Art Teacher in New York City. For me, teaching and creating art go hand and hand.

Alanna, 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 am a visual artist and teacher living and working in New York City. I hold a BFA from St. John’s University, an MFA from City College of New York, and I am certified in K-12 Visual Arts and working as an Art Teacher in New York City. I have been included in group shows at The Painting Center, Ground Floor Gallery, Friday Studio Gallery, The Blanc NY, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, and the Staten Island Museum. In July 2018, I was an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center. I am a painter who explores landscape, patterns of light, and the physicality of paint.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I think that my goal as a creative person is to always continue to make my artwork. I remember during my MFA thesis defense, after my committee deliberated and came back to speak with me, my thesis advisor, who has since passed away, shared something that every committee member agreed upon. He said, “We all agreed that you should never stop painting.” I will never forget that moment and those words have truly impacted me as an artist. The paintings that I make are unique to me and they are a way of me understanding and appreciating the world around me. The artwork that I make is my way of communicating my perspective and the way I see things.

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

One of the best decisions I ever made as a creative person was to go to school for my MFA. I think that everything I did during that program was in a way unlearning everything I had learned up until that point. Art is often taught in a traditional way with traditional materials. I think my MFA program really taught me to think outside the box with that. During this program, the materials became just as important as the artwork I was actually making. It really became very process oriented. At one point, I was painting on mesh fabric – the paint would seep through the fabric- and then I would re stretch the material on the other side so that the reverse image was presented to viewers. I didn’t just arrive on day one of the program doing this – it was a series of steps that took me to this place but I just think it’s so exciting to paint in this way. In my thesis I wrote a lot about the physicality of paint and how important that is to my process. I think it’s very exciting as an artist to learn things, unlearn things, challenge what you think you know or what you think art should be.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.alannarosedunn.com
• Instagram: @alanna.rose.dunn