Anne Livingston
DAY 97 - Anne Livingston
Anne Livingston, a painter, writer, culinarian, and educator, holds a BA in Comparative Literature from University of Washington, a Master in Teaching from Seattle University, and an AAS in Culinary Arts from Seattle Culinary Academy. She’s an alumna of The Modern Color Atelier for painting at Gage Academy of Art.
As an educator she has led faculty departments as English Chair, Grade Level Team Leader, and Dean of Students at Forest Ridge Middle School. She has directed and coordinated education programs and organized large-scale events in schools and in the community. She has taught a broad variety of classes, from core academic courses to arts-based classes including drawing, painting, swing dance, and cooking. Regardless of teaching topic she prioritizes experiential and cooperative learning.
Following years of teaching she earned her culinary degree and worked as a food photographer and stylist. As a columnist and photographer for Edible Seattle Magazine, she also wrote and illustrated SoupZine, an activist cookbook which she sold as a fundraiser for Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy organization.
After decades of pursuing art studies alongside her teaching and culinary careers, she transitioned to painting full-time 5 years ago. Merging art with education, she recently completed a project called “100 Days of Color Backstory,“ in which she researched, wrote about, and created paintings showcasing over 50 pigments and colors. This work serves as a seed for her master’s thesis project.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
I am a lifelong collector of obsessions. I pursue topics with intense focus, turning them inside out, relating them with previous hard-won gems of knowledge, and applying them to art. As a neurodivergent person I love to make art in a lateral-thinking or inventive way, creating connection, meaning, or metaphor between ideas, fields, and materials.
Another important theme in my path is service. While I make work to authentically express myself, a significant part of that self is a drive to benefit others, especially in the modes of healing, educating, paradigm-shifting, and creating community.
For this reason I wish to expand my art practice to social practice. My experiences painting, teaching, working for a magazine, making zines, researching color, and building community now culminate into a new bricolage: a series of zines about color called Chromazine. Chromazine includes pigment history, science, news, and artwork, as well as color-specific activities and invitations for the reader to engage personally with colors. Some of these engagements will be solitary exercises, and others will involve group experiences. Either way, they will hopefully serve as approachable and appealing ways for the reader to personally grow, appreciate the power of color in their life or their art, and to feel included and connected in the larger scheme of art history.
Making Chromazine and engaging directly with people in the color experiences will serve as the supporting architecture for my master’s thesis research this year.