Ann Marshall, Persephone
Ann Marshall
One of Ann Marshall's fondest memories of growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, is when her mother taught her to draw a cat using circles, triangles, and a long curvy line for the tail, nourishing her passion for art.
After earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from School of Visual Arts in New York City, Marshall explored different media producing portraits, wildlife, cartoons, and illustration. But for the last few years, the New York City-based artist's main focus has been creating remarkable drawings depicting the human experience that surrounds her.
Recently, Art and Color 365 had the opportunity to ask Marshall about her work.
Ann Marshall, Changing Trains in Secaucus
After working with different media over the years, what led you to your current choice — Procreate on iPad using an Apple Pencil?
I was trained academically and stayed away from digital work most of my life, instead favoring pastels, collage, and ballpoint pens. I wasn't against digital tools philosophically; they just didn't get me where I wanted to go.
As the technology improved and it crept more into my professional life, I became increasingly adept with the tools.
These days spare time is rare, so creating personal art is more easily accomplished if I'm working in a deeply familiar medium. Also, the iPad is so nicely portable — one of my most popular drawings was created on a flight to and from Texas.
What has drawn you to portraits and how do you choose your subjects?
I never tire of painting people; every face is a life story. Earlier, I mostly drew lush and colorful portraits of women I knew. Now I'm interested in more complicated depictions of the human experience, leaving me to mostly draw strangers.
I view my current work as a kind of reporting of sorts. My mission is to carefully observe the city and people around me and to tell their stories with care.
Ann Marshall, Weekend Drop-off
Sometimes more traditional artists have a problem accepting any kind of digital art as legitimate, even when the work is completely freehand like yours. Do you run into that?
All the time, but more with the older generation of artists. Younger generations don't care. Tools are tools and it only matters in the end what you make with them. It's absurd to insist that "real artists" only work with 17th century materials. We ask this purity of no other profession. We don't insist "real writers" abstain from laptops and Microsoft Word.
How would you describe your artistic style and drawing technique? How did they evolve?
My current strain of work evolved from subway sketches I created decades ago. There was a period where I was questioning all the work I had ever made. It all just seemed so silly and overwrought.
The subway drawings, though — these small drawings on loose pieces of cheap paper — there was something there, something seemed "true." But at the time I couldn't figure out how to take that work further, so I just stuffed them in a drawer.
Years passed, and then one day the answer as to what to do with those drawings came from my day job. As a consumer anthropologist I have to do rapid real time whiteboard drawings with only line work and markers. I applied this to the iPad, building layers on layers — all with line — working fast.
Ann Marshall, Alicia
What are you trying to convey to your audience?
It's all about the subject and whatever it is they're going through. I want to acknowledge a broad and complicated world and draw attention to the tiny experiences that are universally relatable. By acknowledging these specific instances, I hope to capture something honest and beautiful. I try to put myself in the mind of my subjects as much as possible and convey their reality as accurately and respectfully as I can.
From a technical standpoint, often less is more. This means keeping the work a little rough and simplified in some areas and obsessively focusing on the tiny nuances of a facial expression in another. As a result, the focus becomes the core emotional experience without a lot of distracting visual noise.
Ann Marshall, Pas de Trois
What advice would you give aspiring artists?
The advice I always give, which no one wants to hear, is practice. Whatever medium you use, practice until you become proficient. After that, you need to make original work, and make a lot of it. This is the only way you'll get better. It will be hard and most of the time you will fail until the one day when you don't.
You must have something to say. Art is more than being a dancing pony performing tricks. Be sincere and honest. Limit your use of social media as an arbiter of your work. Algorithms are designed to manipulate and will eventually influence the kind of art you produce if you're not careful.
It's important for more mature artists to ask what the main goal of your work is, i.e. accuracy, truth, beauty, satire. Then make decisions to ensure your work reflects your goal. Often that means stripping things down. Sometimes it means polish. Sometimes it means (to borrow a literary term) "killing your darlings."
Focus on and make choices about what is important to you. What of value can you point out and share? You are an arbiter of meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. Take your role as an artist and your art seriously.
You can see more of Marshall's work online at annmarshallart.com or @annmarshallart.