Anne Appleby

Before her formal studies, Anne Appleby spent a fifteen-year apprenticeship with an Ojibwe Indian elder in Montana. From him, she learned her patient observation of nature. Although Appleby’s paintings are composed of abstract panels each essentially a single color, she thinks of them as landscapes. She carefully observes specific plants or seasons and uses their colors as they grow and change in works that are particular to them. “As I work, I develop an inner dialogue about the meaning of what I’m doing,” she says. “But I can’t paint that. I can’t even speak it. It’s denser than my activity.” What she does paint is glowing fields of color that seem as alive as the plants she speaks of in her titles.

Appleby has had solo shows at the Ulrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, Museum Ritter, Germany, and Missoula Art Museum, Montana. She has also participated in group exhibitions in institutions such as the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, the American Academy in Rome, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where in 1996 she was awarded the SFMoMA SECA Award. She was also the 1999 recipient of the Biennial Award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in New York. 

Courtesy of Crown Point Press