We continually move through time and space, but never-the-less humans continue to try to stop this fluctuation. Our desire to construct a sense of home, through architecture, objects, habits, and rituals are acts of distraction where we can find relief in regularity. This new body of work, Midwestern Green/Western Blue, addresses the idea of home not as a static or singular habitable place but rather as a dynamic experience, found in multiple locations.

 For me, the marrow between each place often leaves a great sense of missingness and ache. I recognize this feeling as a desire to keep a thing, a place or experience, in my grasp. While painting, in the studio, internalized and past experiences are called up.  These memories have been embossed onto my psyche and are realized as color, as paintings. Great green caves of trees, turquoise waves of water, the first green shoots of life pressing out of frosty earth or the hot yellow / orange / sky with black-shaped silhouettes of palms carved into that brief sky, inform these paintings. The title and work in this exhibition explore the extravagance of being able to move between Spring / Summer in Kansas/Missouri and Fall / Winter in California, and the sense of longing for each while away from the other. I suppose, as the saying goes, the grass is greener, and the ocean is blue-er while on each respective side of the geographical fence. 

• Anne Austin Pearce, 2023

Anne Austin Pearce, a Midwesterner all her life, is now pulled by two opposite forces, her love of teaching and nature in California, and her family and sense of belonging in Kansas/Missouri.   Pearce has always been adventurous and has traveled the world to experience nature and culture in remote, often endangered, and beautiful locations.   In her paintings, mostly abstract, Pearce has always sought to express the transitory state of the natural world, its beauty and fragility.  She leads with her heart and never more so than in her current exhibition, Midwestern Green/Western Blue.

 Anne Austin Pearce’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, OP, KS; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Museum of Art and Design at Miami Date College, FL; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ and others.  She has participated in numerous artist’s residencies and received a 2015 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Grant and a 2012 Charlotte Foundation Visual Artist Award.