Anna Maria Nieves

Mercury Moon, Fleming Island, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Hidden Pleasure, Fleming Island, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Sunlight Through Spanish Moss, Fleming Island, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Old Hard Road, Fleming Island, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Paradise Isn't Always Where You Think It Is, Middleburg, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Lost Highway II, Fleming Island, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Lost Highway I, Fleming Island, Florida @ Anna Maria Nieves, 2014

Whitey's Fish Camp, Fleming Island, Florida @Anna Maria Nieves, 2014.

Living in the much less vibrant suburbs of Florida also makes me feel anonymous…although with none of the connectedness to the hustle and flow of everyday life and times…yes, there is nature and more nature and yes, it is beautiful as I’ve always known and expected…but sometimes too much of a good thing is just too much…I crave experience, connectedness and the type of enrichment I can only find through the accessibility to the life and culturally affirming activities that suburban life does not easily provide and is not structured to promote when distance is not easy to traverse and opportunity is almost always out of reach.  I find that individuality here is less about being an individual within a cohesive network of individuals but rather about being disconnected individuals.  Sadly, I feel it seems to promote a severely discordant sense of harmony.  While I am not exactly a stranger to the suburban experience having had access to it for short intervals at different times in the past, this full time suburban experience has made me feel so much less connected to my community with few opportunities and options, a feeling that I never experienced in New York City despite being one among millions.

Anna Maria Nieves

In suburban Florida, the thing I really miss is just being able to walk down the street to shop, to just take a walk and see people and the everyday sights and sounds of the neighborhood like I could when I lived in New York City…it really adds so much to feeling connected to your community and to your sense of place...now I find that having to drive down a suburban highway at least a mile or more to get to everything makes me feel so much more disconnected, things just whizz by leaving a fuzzy, barely glimpsed landscape, and always making me feel as if I’m either trying to escape or chasing down a runaway dream that is always just out of reach…

She Used to Be a Ballerina, Graphite on Pencil, 2006, C. Anna Maria Nieves.

Although I have occasionally worked on a still life or landscape over the years, as an artist I am most drawn to the human figure and specifically to the unusual and quirky individuals who I perceive as somehow “other”.  Over the years, as an Americanized Latina of Puerto Rican descent I have grappled with very similar feelings of otherness and not fully belonging, while also experiencing illogical episodes of discrimination by employers and misunderstanding by fellow Latinos who just “don’t get me”.  What I’ve come to realize is that as individuals we may differ in the specifics, yet we all have the same primal needs and desires as human beings, regardless of the labels we or others impose on us.  It is this basic fact about the human condition that draws me to portraits and the figure, my own need to understand and empathize with the specifics I perceive—and the hope and despair that we all experience at times—while exploring the whole individual and what it means and feels like to be human.  It is my desire to convey this to my audience so that they may find something within the subjects of my work that will resonate with them on that same primal level.

Medusa, Graphite on Paper, 2009, C. Annamaria Nieves.