About the Artist

Contemporary artist, Annie Dunn, is a night owl who grew up across the street from a small-town cemetery in northwestern Iowa. She grew up thinking of skeletons as old, eccentric neighbors. Born vision impaired, she competes in a visual field because she wants people to experience the altered perceptions of a vision-impaired visual artist. Her paintings reflect the dark from a cheerfully macabre point of view, and feature misunderstood creatures, shadowy forests, lively graveyards and starry night skies. In a way, her painting has reacquainted her with her childhood love of writing spooky stories, though now she does it with pictures instead of words.

She considers her work largely symbolic and geared toward existential themes, and often focuses on skeletons and cats. The neighborhood skeletons of her childhood have developed into abstract human symbols she uses to tell mythic stories in her pieces. The cats double as character actors who provide a touch of beauty and comic relief to serious subjects. Annie wants her art to raise the social status of cats, as well as the people who love them.

Annie’s medium is freehand digital painting and her tools consist of a pressure-sensitive tablet and stylus connected to a color-accurate computer workstation. Production pieces take about a month to complete and are printed as limited editions using archival materials. Annie also creates a smaller, more-experimental painting every single week.