In conversation with Anna Gutierrez-Garcia
Hosted by Holly Barton at Beer Rebellion for Deer in Traffic.
Okay, so the first question I had, please just describe your practise.
My practise is, well I'm primarily an oil painter, but recently I've started growing an interest in materiality and texture, and I love a lot of oil pastel now. About a year ago I would have described myself as a portrait and figurative artist, but after encountering Cecily Brown and Ana Mendieta, both artists who, actually, they're very different artists, but Cecily Brown being a painter, she has a very specific technique of kind of blending figuration and abstraction, which kind of completely changed the way I think about my work.
I used to be so dismissive of abstraction, but now I think understanding and making a more kind of ambiguous image can make it more interesting, and it means like any viewer can insert themselves into it. I think it can like display a wider kind of emotional feeling or context. And then Ana Mendieta I'm very drawn to, she was a performance-based land artist, she was kind of one of the pioneers in body and earth art.
But the themes I explore in my work is kind of the connection between human and nature, body and nature, and that's very much what she does in her practise, but for her it's very literal, she puts her own body in the soil, in the nature, and for me it's like, okay, how do I translate that into painting? So, I kind of hide hidden figures and abstracted figures within the natural scenes I paint.
When you think about hiding bodies, is there a hidden message or meaning behind that?
I think part of it is about deconstructing kind of the hierarchy that places human above nature, I think that's quite, you know, like capitalistic or just a human egocentric kind of world. A lot of people see nature as an afterthought, it's just something there, something to be dominated, or we use it to our advantage, but I think I try and display nature as a more powerful kind of platonist force. Where the nature is the protagonist, and the human is kind of more subverted and hidden, and almost more of an afterthought. But at the same time, I like to think about the relationship between human and nature, I want to see it as one and the same, it's kind of about rebuilding those bonds between human and the environment. So I want them to all seem like they're made up of the same stuff, we're all organic matter, all made of the same components.
I think a lot about the continuation of human life after death, through nature, we're all bound for death, and then we'll decay and we'll be reabsorbed, and you know returned into something else. So I think that's one of the key themes in my art, life cycles, and the contrast between life and death, but how it's necessary, I think.
But yeah so I think it's in my artist statement, but yeah, one of the key things I'm interested in is the inherent dichotomies in life, you know, it's really like cringe to say, but it's kind of that yin and yang. So there's that life and death, there's a beauty and you know horror, there's a pain and pleasure, and I think a lot of that I understand by just observing nature.
you see... I mean, it is everywhere.
Yeah, completely, it's everywhere, completely. I grew up in South Africa, and you almost feel like you're in a David Attenborough episode, but when you're there, you really see how savage nature is. And how sad it is, life is so, you know, fleeting, and most things don't survive, but it's all this pain, and this kind of horror. But it's necessary to keep things going, and at the same time, it's all about this, all this birth, and this beauty, and things that are just...
Really, it is like a yin and yang.
Completely, and then with that, I'm interested in just human emotion, and my own emotions, I think. I see my work as being autobiographical, even though no one would look at my paintings and be like “oh, this is Anna telling the story of her life”, but I think that's part of the painting process for me. I'm thinking about myself and my emotions and my experiences as I paint and I kind of see metaphors reflected in nature. So it'll be like oh you've got to get through the cold, tough winter, but then there's going to be a beautiful spring, something beautiful is going to happen. And I'll relate that to a difficult period in my life, that there's a promise of kind of things getting better and it's kind of all these life's fluctuations, and emotional fluctuations, that are personal and they're reflected in nature.
Because like you said, it's abstraction, like you put your emotion into it, and that's like, what comes through when you paint it.
Definitely, thinking about emotion, I've been looking more at the abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell, and her response to nature in her work. Where it's not a literal representational image when she paints landscapes, but it's kind of the emotional, an imprint that she feels from experiencing a landscape, and so with now, with my mark making, and the colour I use, I kind of want it to be charged with emotional feeling.
A lot of the time I look at my works, and they feel very overstimulating. I think because everything's kind of composed by these little marks and loads of colour. And sometimes I completely regret the choices of colour I use, and they often give you a bit of a headache, like sometimes my paintings are headache-inducing.
But I think that entirely reflects what you're trying to get through, because you don't really look at, you know, lions and how they kill and eat animals, and you think like, oh my god, that's beautiful, it can be headache inducing – there’s an edge to it.
Yeah, it definitely comes through. Yeah, I think because I'm trying to convey so many things at once, I think I'm trying to convey the feeling of being alive, and the anxieties of being alive, and you know, my anxiety, like personal anxiety, and anxiety about the planet.
And that is overstimulating, but it's also very beautiful, I think.
One thing in art that's important to me is I still want it to be beautiful, I think. I want people to want to look at it, and I want myself to want to look at it, so it's important that they're very detailed.
It draws you in as well, when something is so detailed, you want to go in to look more at the tiny brush strokes, and like, especially when you hide things in paintings, I think it's so, like, amazing, because you do just naturally feel drawn.
I hope so, when I was reading an article about Cecily Brown, someone described her work as rewarding, active-looking, and I think that's something that I've always, I've been trying to carry through to my own work, I want it to reward for the viewer. I want it so the more they look, the more they see, it becomes a bit more of a sensory, interactive experience almost a bit like an I-spy.
Would you say that you're, like, kind of inspired by eco-feminism, then?
Yes. Definitely, I think that was kind of what I wrote my dissertation about, was how the body in nature is reinvented. I was looking at Cecily Brown trying to break away from traditional Western patriarchal representations of the female figure and nature within art.
They've always been painted for either the male gaze or as, like, a territory for domination. Whether it's a female body I'm painting, whether it's an environment or nature, I want to show it as its own powerful autonomous entity, rather than, like, oh, a land that is there for human harvest or a female body that is there for the male gaze.
I think we have just covered what is your creative process and how it's developed, but do you have anything more to say on that?
I think more and more so poetry and reading is coming into my work. I think I'm an artist because I feel like I'm bad with my words, so I almost feel like a thief sometimes when it comes to poets and writers, because I often use lines of poetry or lines from a book as the titles for my own work. When I'm reading something and it feels like it completely clicks and perfectly sums up what I'm trying to say. So, I think I'm more and more so being very much inspired by poetry.
I think it does go hand in hand, even though there are different forms of creation.
But, Mary Oliver, she's a poet who I'm very, very drawn to, and I read a lot of her work. And it's all about just paying attention to the world around us and being present, I think. That's another big thing nature brings to me, and I wanted to bring through my work, is almost a call, like forcing the viewer to slow down and look at these small moments.
I feel like a child sometimes walking down the street and I see a little weed going through the cracks and I look at it and I enjoy it. Yeah, I think we all should more. I think it's just such a wonderful way to be present and just to enjoy these small miracles of life.
Yeah, definitely. I think our society is so built by, like, capitalism. You have to build, build, build, and not pay any attention. You have to work, and we just kind of forget that it's actually so incredible that we're here. You look out and you don't really see that anymore.
You know, even in Peckham, you wouldn't think of Peckham as a place that's filled with nature, but I walk around and it’s in those little pieces of grass in front of that council flat by the bus stop, I wait by that bus stop every day and I see the way the flowers are blooming and the balsam trees and I kind of mark the passage of time or meditate on the passage of time by the changes in the flowers around me. Every time I walk past a dandelion, I have to pick one and I have to blow a wish.
But, yeah, interacting with the environment is just... It's a whole relationship. And I want to encourage that in other people.
I think you’ve answered the meanings behind the bodies and the florals, but I've noticed that you use coffee grounds in your work. How does that work into the materiality of your paintings?
So, that kind of started... I started doing that about last September. So, what's that, like six months ago or something now? And I just did it as an experiment because I remember last year I saw another student on our course, Lara. She was using salt in her oil paint to give it more body and texture.
I'd always wanted to experiment more with texture. And Google suggested that coffee might be more stable. So, I was like, OK, I'll give coffee a go. I feel like it's completely transformed the way I paint and my practise. Like, firstly, it just gives a beautiful, really textured surface to paint on that everything becomes a bit more sculptural and 3D, which I really enjoy. I think my paintings prior really lacked and they were really flat.
But secondly, I love that it just looks like soil. It looks like damp, wet soil.
It's almost like the perfect thing for me to start painting these natural forms on. And also, it stains the canvas really beautifully.
And as I'm priming the canvas with the coffee, it forms these really gorgeous organic shapes and the paintbrush leaves grooves. And then once that's all dried and I start priming the paint, I kind of use the shapes and the stains that I see emerging from the coffee grounds because they kind of clump in interesting ways.
Almost like there's the old, I think, Eastern tradition of reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. It almost feels like that to me because I'll see like a face emerge or like a moving body, or I'll see kind of a collection of plants.
Is that how and where you place your body?
Yes, so that's often how I dictate my composition is just the initial shapes I kind of see emerging. It's almost like a weird, like, hallucination. I'll look at it and it's kind of like cloud watching. I'll stare at it, it's just this canvas that's been primed with coffee and I'll look at it and I just, I'll see kind of the composition coming to life.
And then I'll first go in with oil pastels and I'll mark out a few like really loose shapes just to give it a little bit of like structure. And with that, I'll often either look at photos of flowers or landscapes I've taken or sometimes even just looking on Pinterest, I'll see some like colour combinations of flowers that I really like. Or a specific plant that I'm really drawn to.
I'll mark those in and then I put down then reference images and then it's just intuitive. Yeah, I just I respond, which I think that's what I've really gained from the way my painting has changed the last few months. I think before I was trapped in taking a reference photo and doing like direct translation of the reference photo, which I think works for a lot of artists, but I think for me, I got bored of that after a while where I just, I couldn't insert myself into it.
Whereas that's what I've gained from abstraction and the new style that I work in now is that it's so much more intuitive, this feels so much more authentic and it's intuitive and it's more playful and also working on a larger scale becomes almost like a performance.
So I think it's, yeah, it's been very freeing for me to kind of move into the abstraction space. But I'm not in like full abstraction. I think it's still relatively obvious, you can still see that I'm painting nature and flowers and trees and plants.
But there are moments where like this is confusing which I like. I like the ambiguity.
So we've spoken a bit about your influences. Are there any more?
So Cecily Brown and Ana Mendieta, yes, I'd say are the two biggest influences like in the last year that have really shaped my current practise. But I'm also very drawn to Joan Mitchell, who I mentioned earlier. Odilon Redon, he is one of my favourite artists of all time, I think.
He was way before time in terms of creating these beautiful, decorative, almost Japanese-inspired nature paintings. But he was kind of using abstraction in the way he painted plants long before I think a lot of other people were.
Monet, obviously. My favourite painting when I was younger was John Singer Sargent's ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’. I think that painting will forever and always be one of my favourites.
I feel like when you have a certain piece as well that you saw as a child, it really sticks with you.
It's just, you know, that painting, it's two girls playing in this garden and it's at dusk and there are these lanterns, and it just reminds me of growing up in South Africa, in the garden. Those are my childhood memories of just exploring and playing in nature.
It's just this whole other world that your imagination and your reality kind of connect. And then also Rachel Jones, she's been a big influence for me specifically in using oil pastels. And also in these big, emotional landscapes that aren't necessarily landscapes, they look like landscapes, like she'll paint a massive mouth and it'll turn into like this canyon-like expansive landscape.
So she's been big for me. Also, Christina Kimeze, who was showing at the South London Gallery last year as well, she paints really beautiful paintings with her use of colour and like bold marks. She also has these kind of female figures, often solitary figures in quite subtle landscapes.
So she's been a big influence for me. Who else? So many others. So many others.
So what's your next project? You mentioned going to the RCA.
So yes, in September, I'll be starting my MA painting at the RCA.
Which is incredible.
Thank you. I'm really excited for that. Yeah, it's always been my dream to go there.
So I'm very happy with that. And I guess just keep the momentum going and also just keep experimenting. I think the last few months I've been producing a body of work that's finally felt like it's clicked and I feel much more excited about it, I think I finally found somewhat of an independent or individual style.
I think the fear of an artist is getting too stuck on the same thing and it's like, okay, well, what next? How can I push it? How can I change it? And I think that's why I'm lucky I'm doing an MA is that I'll have that support from tutors around me who will force me to keep pushing my comfort zone, which hopefully I'll keep producing better work.
So maybe I need to keep pushing. Keep finding something new. And also, I want to keep creating bigger work.
I'd love to do some projects where I just, you know... Huge. Yeah, huge. I'd love to make really, really immersive work.
I do make smaller paintings, but I think my work works better on a larger scale.
My last question is, what's your favourite piece?
My favourite piece that I've done?
Yeah, that you've done.
I think the piece of mine that I was most proud of was The Earth Laughs in Flowers, which is the piece I made in January for our SPG exhibition. I think that was the largest work I had done to date.
It's three panels and the total height is 170 centimetres by 180 centimetres. Even since then, I've done much larger work, but that was the first time I felt like there was a real click in the practise and that work feels like an explosion of colour and energy.
But there's also a lot of darkness in it and that work responds to a poem called Hamatreya by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The poem is about how humans often brag about owning land and being dominating land and territory and the title, one of the lines in the poem, ‘The Earth Laughs in Flowers’, can be read in two ways.
You can read it as in the Earth is being wonderful to us and it's giving us all these joyous, beautiful flowers, but it can also be read as ultimately we think we're dominating the world. In some ways we are because we're destroying it, but also the world and nature is much more enduring and powerful than we are. We're bound to die.
We will die, but long before us, long after us, nature will continue. It's almost as if the Earth is laughing at our ignorance to thinking that we own it and we control it because it's far greater than we will ever be.
It's also funny when you think about it in the past, the amount of land that you own is directly correlated to your power and your status.
Completely. Thinking about territory and land is just interesting. Because I'm interested in these dichotomies where everything feels good and beautiful, but then there's also this darkness or this undercurrent of a darker message or meaning, I think that work successfully captured that.
That would probably be my favourite work I've done so far. Also my degree showpiece which is 3 metres 60, so just under 4 metres. I'm proud of that piece because it's the largest I've ever done.
I am excited to show that for the degree show. That one is titled ‘No Feeling Is Final’. That piece really explores the passage of time and changing of seasons.
For two reasons. One, because I painted it during spring and I'm really aware and responsive to the environment changing around me and also just as we are approaching the end of our degree and I've been reflecting a lot on where I was and who I was when I started my painting degree and who I am now. I feel completely transformed and I was in a pretty bad place a few years ago and now I'm in a wonderful place.
The title ‘No Feeling Is Final’ comes from the Mary Oliver poem but what it really means to me is that nothing is fixed and there will always be fluctuations and things will be bad and they'll be good and they'll be bad again, just like there's winter and there's death and there's darkness and there's spring and joy and hope and sunshine and happiness but it's just that continuous cycle. Nothing will ever be the same. Nothing's final but also that's almost like a mantra to myself when you're feeling shit and you're having a bad day and you're going through the trenches but it's not final, it's not the end so it's also a reminder to keep going.
That's a beautiful message.
Thank you.
I’m really excited for your art to be in Beer Rebellion! It's going to be amazing. I think it's just going to look so good with the walls and the plants.
Yeah, definitely. I've got about five monsteras in my bedroom so my paintings are always framed by some pop plants. I hope in my studio one day, my dream one day would be to have a gallery that's also a plant shop/ florist/ coffee shop as well.
Anna Gutierrez-Garcia's show will be on display at Beer Rebellion from the 27th of May 2026.
Private view 7pm 27.5.26
Beer Rebellion, 129 Queen’s Rd, London, SE15 2ND
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