Bio

Anastasia Zielinski (b. 1983 Washington D.C.) is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus in oil painting, mixed-media collage, and installation art. Bright and bold with an emphasis on texture, her art is a celebration of the natural world and the benefits gained from time spent in nature. Anastasia’s multi-layered work is characterized by an abundance of visual information that verges on excess yet is appropriate to the subject. She credits the memory of her mother’s overflowing sewing cabinet for the reoccurring and expansive use of fabric and sewing notions within her work, both as material and inspiration for mark-making. With a BFA from Pratt Institute (2005 Brooklyn, NY) Anastasia’s foundation in traditional oil painting has informed how she approaches other mediums. Ms. Zielinski has shown her work nationally and internationally and has created site- specific installations for INSCAPE arts, Shunpike’s Storefront Seattle, and Spaceworks Tacoma. She currently lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Statement

My work is a documentation of the physical world as well as an exploration of the changing environment and our connection to it.

As a society we are increasingly detached from nature and bombarded with information from a 24-hr news cycle, social media, and our devices. Concurrently there has been a slow building mental health crisis.

As someone who has personally battled episodes of depression and low self-worth since puberty, I aim to create immersive experiences through art that propagates positivity and beauty, producing moments of wonder and joy to counteract the difficulties of living.

Time spent outdoors is vital to both my wellbeing and artistic practice. It is a necessary escape from the noise and distraction of our modern world. Whether walking through a city park or hiking through the wilderness, this act of moving meditation fills me with quiet calm, heightening my awareness. My surroundings dissolve into patterns of color and light as I experience wonder, creative energy, and a desire to share these positive sensations with others.

The imagery within my work stems from the natural world. My practice starts with meditative walks and is periodically accompanied by the creation of plein-air drawings. A process of distilling and abstracting occurs from the beginning; my vision simultaneously blurs certain details while elevating others. Exploration does not end in the wilderness but seeps into my studio practice with the creation multi- layered fiber-based collages and oil paintings. The addition of each layer and mark within a piece is an active search for the perfect amount of information with which to express the spirit of these therapeutic environments. The result is bright, bold, visually-busy compositions that include patterns and textures that may not exist in the original place yet express it perfectly.