Anne-Louise Ewen

Two Solitudes by Anne-Louise Ewen

2023

Born 1976, New Orleans California-based Artist Anne-Louise Ewen paints vivacious gestural works that emphasize brush work, color, and above all, freedom. Her work includes paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, and books. Ewen grew up in a small South Louisiana town on the Mississippi River, known for both the beauty of its antebellum architecture and its proliferation of toxic oil refineries. A chance encounter in the summer between second and third grade introduced Ewen to one of her first art mentors who taught her the fundamentals of drawing with charcoal and encouraged her to draw from life every day, a formative experience which established visual art as a core element of her life. She later attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts (a magnet boarding school) concentrating on a curriculum of fine art before spending two years studying figure drawing, printmaking and painting in Paris, France. During her college years, she made art, studied philosophy, and founded The Donaldsonville Art Colony, a brief but influential collective of painters, writers, musicians, and filmmakers, an experience she drew from years later when she launched an independent art gallery in Orange County, California in 2007. She moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, fulfilling a lifelong desire to reconnect with her mother's California ancestry, an artistic family which included composer Louis Waldemar Everson and Beat poet Brother Antoninus aka William Everson. Ewen left Los Angeles in 2020 for Joshua Tree, California, a small artistic community in the Mojave Desert where you can find her painting and taking long drives through the national park.