Pictured above: “Tossed at Sea”, by Anne Canfield (oil on panel, 12″ x 12″, 2009)

Within the white rotunda walls of Sam Quinn Gallery in West Philadelphia, nearly a dozen of Anne Canfield’s 12″x12″ pastel-toned paintings adorn the white gallery walls, weaving a fairy-tale like narrative for gallery visitors among various abstract sculptures by Anna Hernandez.

The “Fiber of My Being” series reveals a delicate visual language depicting Canfield’s personal landscape of majestic animal characters, reminiscent of Maxfield Parrish’s landscapes, mixed with Egon Shiele’s evocative aesthetic and Alice Neal’s abstract portraiture.

When viewing Canfield’s art, the viewer should have an open imagination and curiosity to see beyond the literal objects within the painting, to reach into him or herself and stretch contemplation on a visual, emotional, and spiritual level.

Canfield grew up with a rich visual vocabulary around the Pennsylvania Dutch area of Lancaster, PA and attended Moore College of Art for her Bachelor of Fine Arts. She has also studied at the Yale Summer School of Painting in Norfolk and is a recent alumna of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia. Her work has been displayed in numerous galleries and several museums, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Ice Box Project Space, Maryland Art Place, Woodmere Art Museum, Sam Quinn Gallery, Cerulean Arts, and Seraphin Gallery.

Anne Canfield’s realm of mythological creatures exudes playfulness: several intricate cats, quiet dogs, a merman, a ubiquitous mermaid, and a goose are juxtaposed with each other and house-hold items in a contemplative and serious way. The viewer cannot help but chuckle. Other times, the animals appear apprehensive and startled, reminding you slightly of Get Fuzzy characters. Yet, these sometimes-at-odds characters create a sense of family and home, from a symbolic, surreal, and mythological perspective.

This realm is a collection of places and memories, ranging from courtyards and paved English streets and train-stations to Bruges, Lichtenstein, and Italy. The work is portraiture in the most abstract sense of the word, where the traditional figure and face is replaced by the abstract relationships between her characters and the landscape. Her work is highly more personal than a simple figure portrait, and it delves far deeper into the meaning of reality. A visual similarity can be found in illustrations of intricate Germanic fairy tales, such as “The Bremen Town Musicians” from The Brothers Grimm.

“I am less fearful of making the type of art that pleases me. I have passed the idea of limitation and discernment. I realized that I did not have to do everything and accepted that the illustrations from my childhood are what made me love art and what continues to inspire me in my work,” says Canfield, in regard to her personal development as an artist. “Growing as an artist requires that you get rid of all of the outside information [about what makes good or bad art] and follow through on your own hunches.”

Canfield allows the viewer the freedom of interpretation. Just as fables are sometimes hints at the meaning of a story, so are Canfields’ landscapes, they are portraits of her, yet they are entirely separate and delicately rendered in themselves. An example of universality of visual language, Slavic/Russian literature scholars will recognize these characters as those of Alexander Pushkin’s fairytale “Ruslan and Lydmila” that starts with the lines:

On seashore far a green oak towers,
And to it with a gold chain bound,
A learned cat whiles away the hours
By walking slowly round and round.
To right he walks, and sings a ditty;
To left he walks, and tells a tale….
What marvels there! A mermaid sitting
High in a tree, a sprite, a trail
Where unknown beasts move never seen by
Man’s eyes, a hut on chicken feet,
Without a door, without a window,
An evil witch’s lone retreat;
The woods and valleys there are teeming
With strange things….
Dawn brings waves that, gleaming

In Canfield’s “Half Way”, the wise cat is alongside a mermaid. In literature, the mermaid figure appears in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of “The Little Mermaid”, and also “Undine” by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque. Both stories end tragically for the majestic sprites, yet in some way the archetype speaks to the emotional level of women and men for hundreds of years.

Canfield’s landscapes have a timeliness and a stillness that’s very aware of itself and reminiscent of the religious paintings of the Renaissance. The animals stand poised in contemplation, and their gazes turn inward, slightly anxious and humble around the colorful environment that surrounds them.

Although Canfield’s landscapes hint at sensuality, the feline serves a slightly different purpose in her realm. She relates to the grandiose nature of sacred, powerful cats such as the Egyptian Goddess Bastet, and “The Cat That Walked by Himself” in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. She was directly inspired by Haruki Marikami books where the anthropomorphic animals symbolize parts of the fragmented self. These characters represent the wilderness within the civilized landscapes. What once was a panther, is now a house pet; and likewise, what once was a wolf, is a dog bound by a fence.

In part, the work is a reminder and reminiscent of our wilder selves, personas, if you will, and how with “Meet Halfway” these characters can only look at each other somewhat suspiciously, never touching the ground. Symbolism and surrealism takes shape in her canvases, especially in work like “The Great Escape” and “The Golden Room”, weaving a circuitous thread throughout the narratives. There is also layering of the landscape in “The Hideout” and “Kept by Dogs”, where the protagonist is trapped within the earth beneath her guardians.

In her work, daily relationships intertwine into another dimension, and the longer the viewer spends contemplating her painting, the more the canvases reveal. In a world saturated with the electronic and transitory, her art lets the viewer experience the contradictory forces at play and thereby creates a higher form of connection.

Click the thumbnails below or visit Anne’s website to view more of her work.