ABOUT ANNA MILLER
EDUCATION, EARLY WORK AND TRANSITION.
I have been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil. My mother recognized my talent and encouraged me to start my journey on the long road of art education. In my early teens, I enrolled in a college level art school. Later I was accepted at National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture of Ukraine. After earning my Masters in Painting, I began teaching art at college level. I worked as a college faculty member for twelve years and then I decided to pursue a Masters in Fine Arts at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, California.
My earlier work was representational, with some abstract elements. Looking back, I can see that abstraction was always present in one form or the other in many of my paintings.
During my education, I struggled to find a happy median between my academic education and abstract art, which intrigued me. I was attempting to merge two styles of art, realistic and non-realistic. Then was I decided to move away from figurative art completely and devoted all my time to abstract paintings.
INSPIRATION
My vision began to worsen early on in life. However, I often would not wear my glasses and would start seeing the world differently from the position of a nearsighted person. It was a world without details but with interesting designs, fragments of light with shadows, and incomplete patterns. One of my favorite examples of fragmentation was the fluid design created by light in moving water. The movement of light through water was captivating and meditative: It always brought peace to my soul. My paintings expressed refractions of light. Refractions comes from the observation and perception of color and light patterns found in nature. During painting of these new designs based on refractions, I would get lost in meditation of color, shapes, and lines, discovering limitless possibilities and combinations.