Response Art Work
Page One Examination
2006
Acrylic and graphite on oak
24" x 24"
Anne Faith Nicholls
SPU Alumna of 2000
“Just because something is hard to look
at doesn’t mean it doesn’t have beauty behind
it,” says Seattle Pacific University alumna Anne
Faith Nicholls. True, her work might be difficult
for some to study deeply. After all, it involves
hearts — the human, not valentine, variety.
Because open-heart surgery at a young age
radically changed her life, Nicholls says, hearts
tend to take center stage in her paintings. “My
work is a representation of emotion more than
of an object,” she explains.
In “Page One Examination,” she says, everything
is a symbol. The microscope? That’s
close self-examination. The scarred heart?
New growth.
Nicholls became a paid freelance artist
while still an art student at SPU , selling her
paintings in Seattle to buy books for classes.
She recalls that now Professor Emeritus of Art
Michael Caldwell “was the first person to open
my eyes to the gallery world, saying this could
be a profession for me.”
What Nicholls learned at Seattle Pacific,
she says, helped her as an artist: “It may
sound funny, but at SPU I figured out how to
believe in myself, to find out what I’m good at,
to have faith in what I could do.”
In 2000, she moved to San Francisco, California,
where she studied pop surrealism and
embarked on an art career. “It was a scary
thing,” she recalls, becoming a full-time artist
— without a dependable “backup” job. But for
the past year and a half, Nicholls has made
her dream a reality. Her second solo exhibition,
“Collect My Thoughts,” opens in San Francisco
in December.
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