S
omeone undiscerning may glance around and see chaos, but Annie is actually scary-precise. I ask her about some of her
stencils and she pulls out a box of files with labels like “Animals,” “Butterflies,” “Domino Masks,” “Horned Owls,” “Round
Owls”… apparently owl faces work well on human faces because the eyes are roughly in the same place, and she probably has at
least 25 different mask stencils for owls alone. Her mother once a hospital librarian (I can see Annie’s sense of order here), and
her father a “semi-retired” bio-chemist (maybe this the partial foundation of her scientific eye) — she and her sister seem to have
been raised with imagination and wit. They may not have worked in the arts, but Annie’s parents were inherently artistic. Annie
tells me about the sketchbook her father gave her from his college art class. He was an instant inspiration. Anything that smelled
like a fairytale became a favorite diversion for Annie, from Jim Henson’s The Storyteller to Scandinavian folktales that weren’t
necessarily tooled for children. “Because they were weird stories — they’re older stories — they don’t necessarily go in the very
neat, formulaic direction you’re expecting as a kid; they sometimes did different things where you thought, ‘That’s weird…’”
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ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE