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| "Being a Symbolist, I perceive my life in art to be a series of colorful vines, varying in species. They twist, turn, and wrap around each other. Some are in the bud stage, others in full bloom." | ||||||||
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| Anne Farley Gaines was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1954. On the walls of the family living room were reproductions and original paintings by her great-uncle, Lynn Bogue Hunt, one of America’s foremost wildlife artists. Growing up in the shadow of these works and taking long walks with her mother and sisters in the deep woods by their home, Anne developed an interest in nature-based art at an early age. She began to spend hours drawing and painting at a table near her great-uncle's works. | ||||||||
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| In 1959 the Gaines family moved to South Haven, Michigan, where they lived in a home called Pine Ridge Farm. It was surrounded by vast gardens tended by Anne’s parents. Her father planted an evergreen nursery. Although Anne did not consciously make the decision to be an artist until her first year at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, the images of the home, garden, and nursery have cropped up in many of her works throughout the course of her career. | ||||||||
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| Having played the piano for a number of years and taken four years of vocal music training, Anne initially set out to be a high school choir conductor. Her first Spring quarter Principia College, however, when she took her first college drawing class, the Mississippi River views, the abundant foliage, and the small historic town of Elsah, caused her to be much more inspired by the visual world. Her very early inspirations resurged full force. | ||||||||
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| Among the highlights of Gaines’ college years was a trip to Europe during her senior year with a select group of 22 students to study watercolor and drawing in-depth with professor James Green. This involved working on location in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Upon graduation she received the Catherine Cogswell Maule Art Opportunity Award, and her professional career was in full swing. A highlight of her early years, was painting her first commissioned mural, an 18’x20’ earth-toned work entitled "Florida Water Birds" for a home in Treasure Island, Florida. | ||||||||
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| In the Fall of 1978 Gaines was accepted into Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. For the two years she was there, Anne experimented with a number of different types of composition and dimensional surface treatments in painting. The instructors who had primary influence on her growth and development at that time were Professors Thomas Hilty and Robert Mazur. Her studies at Bowling Green culminated in her first large mural, "Portrait of Bowling Green", for the university library where it is still on display. This passion for "working large" served Gaines and one of her earlier corporate clients, Sara Lee Bakery, well in 1992. Commissioned to create artworks for the Sara Lee Headquarters in Chicago, Gaines created four 20’ by 12’ solar fabric murals entitled "Heartland Almanac". This work colorfully depicts the flora and fauna of the Midwest. This project took up Anne’s entire studio floor for a period of nine months and is still on display at the former Sara Lee headquarters on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago under its new tenant, Ernst & Young Consulting. | ||||||||
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| Hungry to be part of a thriving Art community, Gaines moved to the Pilsen art community of Chicago in 1980 and has continued to live there as an actively producing, exhibiting artist. She received an Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant in 1986 to do a 7’ x 12’ folding screen, "In My Father’s Garden". In addition to the Pilsen Screens studio, Gaines owns a Victorian house in the neighborhood on Nineteenth Street that she has fully rehabbed, and participates in the famous Pilsen East Artists' Open House every fall. This grant sparked further exploration of the folding screens medium. It is her mastery of this medium and delight in its possibilities that inspires Anne to call her studio "Pilsen Screens", even though she works in a variety of other formats. Gaines considers screens "the perfect combination of sculpture and painting." | ||||||||
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| Much of Gaines’ work uses complex surface treatments such as the layering of oriental papers, acrylic paint, canvas threads, polymer mediums, and modeling paste, an outgrowth of her post-graduate work. Anne frequently uses subject matter inspired by travel and particularly loves imagery from the Southwest, tropical areas, Midwest gardens, and, most recently, Canada. As of this writing, her most recent public commission is a 5’x8’ mixed-media painting for 17th Church of Christ, Scientist, Chicago. It is a canvas with a very three-dimensional surface depicting an imaginary Holy Land vista entitled "Millenium Garden: Psalm 23." A derivative of this work sets the background for our website navigation menu. Using gentle colors and ‘informative’ subject matter, this piece was done with her love for children and healing in mind. | ||||||||
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| Being an educator is also a very important aspect of Anne Farley Gaines’ life as an Artist because she feels that it is important to ‘give back.’ Her refreshingly unconventional approach to art education has led her to coordinate the making of collaborative works for permanent display at such institutions as Harper Elementary School, the Chicago Junior School, Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, and the Lockhart Family Nature Center in Lake Forest, Illinois. These projects are generally colorful, tactile, and nature-based, although the Ripon College mural subject was racial harmony. She teaches color theory, design, drawing, and rendering techniques on a regular part-time basis at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Chicago. Among other institutions where Gaines has taught, on a part-time or “Artist in Residence” basis are the North Shore Art League, Winnetka, Illinois, her alma mater, Principia College, in Elsah, llinois, the Chicago Junior School, Elgin, Illinois, and Moraine Valley Community College, Palos Hills, Illinois. | ||||||||
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| In 1999 Anne Farley Gaines met and married David Masak. The couple has begun collaborating in functional art through the making and designing of fine art furniture. The new Gaines-Masak line of furniture combines a series of small, interlocking folding screens as the base, and transparent, shaped polymer tops. Both Anne and Dave are greatly looking forward to the unveiling of their new “Memory Garden Furniture Design Series”. | ||||||||
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| In 1984 Gaines joined A.R.C. (Artist, Residents of Chicago) a women’s cooperative gallery, and has been an affiliate member since 1987. She has participated in over 80 group and one-person exhibitions in such locations as the Toledo Art Museum in Ohio, the Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL, and the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Gaines has been mentioned in no less than six books, including but not limited to Who’s Who of American Women, 1999-2000, 21st Edition, and Surface Decoration for Low-Fire Ceramics by Lynn Peters, published by Lark Books, Asheville, NC, 1999. Over 35 articles, including exhibit reviews, have been written about her work. | ||||||||
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Download The Resume 36kb .zip file of Acrobat Document |
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