Anne Pollard James (b. 1972)  is a contemporary figurative (mostly) oil painter. She found painting the week the world shut down in 2020 and was transformed. There is before and after. Her works explore the many ways women must navigate the spaces that surround them and take the space wanted in a place, made for and by those who often want to keep women out. Her paintings are loud, hard, soft, sweet and sharp: The artist's response to staking her claim and claiming her space in places that often ask/require permission. 

 

“We have held our space with hard humor, or a wink and a nudge, with eyes down, or eyes drawn and staring hard, yet always with our eyes wide open to embrace and defend the space that is rightfully ours. Or the space not yet ours, but that we claim.” 

 

Always through the lens of the spectacular strength of woman, the paintings included in this submission reflect on these notions of breath. Fighting for and finding the space to breathe in. Working from her series of underwater paintings titled ‘Coming Up For Air” into her works in process called Un//Constricted)