Annie Shaver-Crandell

The art I share with my viewers is intended to offer beauty, or comfort, or an invitation to an inquisitive mind to look at something familiar in a new way.

I try to seize color and light, and to transfer my vision onto paper or canvas. As a plein air painter, I gravitate toward edges: the field, the road, the shore. As a still life painter, I organize opportunities to commune with colors and patterns, especially those of flowers and fabric. As an animal painter, I revel in depicting creatures whose structures and movements are very different from our own.

As a former art historian, I am comfortable in the knowledge that I stand on the shoulders of artists that have come before me -- or, at least, alongside the elbows -- of many of them. Though much of my subject matter is to be found in my own surroundings, I feel often that I'm keeping visual, emotional or mental company with many other artists from other times and places who had great ideas and the skills to give them shape where others can see them.