SHORT BIO
Ann Schlesinger is a painter in the Washington, D.C. area. She received her BA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Virginia, her MFA in Painting from American University, and had a year of postgraduate study at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich, Germany
Schlesinger has been the recipient of a Fulbright grant in Painting, the Annette Kade Fine Arts Fellowship, the David Lloyd Kreeger Award, and the Art Prize from the University of Virginia.
After spending twelve years in Prague, Czech Republic, she returned to the DC area with her husband and their family.
Currently, Schlesinger is an Adjunct Professor of Art at Georgetown University. She also teaches painting and drawing classes at Glen Echo’s Yellow Barn Studio, and has taught extensively at several area schools including American University, the University of Maryland, Northern Virginia Community College and the Smithsonian Institution Resident Associate Program.
CV available upon request
ARTIST STATEMENTS
It is the formal elements of color, texture and movement that drive a painting, whether representational or non-objective... Art is a constant seeking, a honing of sensibilities, a push and pull to find the right line, color, tone and texture within a dynamic composition.
THE PERPETUAL SEARCH
What excites me most in painting is the process of searching. I play around with the composition - pushing things up and down, left and right, blowing them up and shrinking them back, changing the angle of my view, altering color and texture… until everything feels as if it’s exactly right. There is a constant push and pull. It’s intuitive and analytical at the same time.
In these paintings, one can see the remnants of that search with bits of line, color and texture peeping out, the remains of a search that continues until I have a sense that everything is in balance, and what I was looking for is captured. Although it is representational, it is really about abstract relationships.
There are struggles: line vs. form, movement vs. solidity, clutter vs. space, realism vs. abstraction. As I work on a painting, the search is continuous, with many changes from start to finish. These paintings are about space and spacing. The precise placement of objects within the composition, and how they relate to each other and to the frame is paramount. And what exactly does finished mean? For me, it means that all parts work with each other, and that there is enough there to convey form, movement and a sense of space.