I think of print making less as a specific media or process, but rather as another form of drawing with the versatility of an endless slate.  The application of selective color allows me to focus attention on specific elements

     My ideas are drawn from a busy life of parenting, teaching, and observing the world around me for both the quirks and the familiar.  I search for ideas, collecting often incongruous elements from words, phrases, photos and sketches. These elements create layers of interest and interpretation.  My message is small, often inconsequential.  Each work takes a playful and humorous look at a subject that has caught my attention. The faces and figures within my work are drawn from real and imperfect people. They are chosen from family, friends, magazines, and art history or interpreted from my own face and body. They are the folks you would see at Wal-Mart any day of the week. I want these people to suggest a much broader range of humanity than the sanitized and homogenized view of most contemporary media. I hope their actions stir memory.

    “Ravel” is drawn from my fascination with the creativity and beauty of cornrow hairstyles.  I equate this craft/art with knitting. Both types of handwork reflect time, skill, tedium, creativity, often femininity, and sometimes the community of shared techniques and collaborative craft.

    Some scenes break subtle rules of common sense or social convention.  Tempting the fate predicted by the manufacturer, the figure in “Mixer” puts her hand into the mixer to retrieve a egg shell.  In “Frost” there appears to be a crowd coaching the process of hair dyeing.   The poses I chose are  often contorted.  The figures become tangled with other objects, as in “Sleep “ where the baby merges with the blanket she sleeps on. 

    In each work I want to point out their humanity with or without regard for their beauty.

Anne Simpkins,  2001