Response Art Work
Page One Examination
2006
Acrylic and graphite on oak
24" x 24"
Anne Faith Nicholls
SPU Alumna of 2000
“Just because something is hard to look
at doesn’t mean it doesn’t have beauty behind
it,” says ɬÀï·¬ alumna Anne
Faith Nicholls. True, her work might be difficult
for some to study deeply. After all, it involves
hearts — the human, not valentine, variety.
Because open-heart surgery at a young age
radically changed her life, Nicholls says, hearts
tend to take center stage in her paintings. “My
work is a representation of emotion more than
of an object,” she explains.
In “Page One Examination,” she says, everything
is a symbol. The microscope? That’s
close self-examination. The scarred heart?
New growth.
Nicholls became a paid freelance artist
while still an art student at SPU , selling her
paintings in ɬÀï·¬ to buy books for classes.
She recalls that now Professor Emeritus of Art
Michael Caldwell “was the first person to open
my eyes to the gallery world, saying this could
be a profession for me.”
What Nicholls learned at ɬÀï·¬ Pacific,
she says, helped her as an artist: “It may
sound funny, but at SPU I figured out how to
believe in myself, to find out what I’m good at,
to have faith in what I could do.”
In 2000, she moved to San Francisco, California,
where she studied pop surrealism and
embarked on an art career. “It was a scary
thing,” she recalls, becoming a full-time artist
— without a dependable “backup” job. But for
the past year and a half, Nicholls has made
her dream a reality. Her second solo exhibition,
“Collect My Thoughts,” opens in San Francisco
in December.
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