Description
‘Careful What You Wish For’ by Annette Hassell
Artist: Annette Hassell
Title: ‘Careful What You Wish For’
Medium: Acrylic on stretched linen canvas
Dimensions: 16″ x 12″
Framing: Framed (frame size: 17″ x 13″)
Year of Creation: 2024
About the Artwork:
“When I painted ‘Careful What You Wish For’, I was thinking about how manifesting what we want in this life is supposed to be possible. So many people seem to believe in this-that we can shape the world the way that we want to, just by thinking about it hard enough. I remain unconvinced. I’ve read too many stories about devious genies or other enchanted wish-granting creatures and what can go wrong when a person tries to use those wishes to make their desires into reality.
I imagine that my scruffy cat was trying to fill up his food bowl with a never ending supply of shiny, beautiful fish. Sadly, his phrasing seems to have been just a bit off. Hopefully, He’ll get it right next time.” – Annette Hassell
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
Annette Hassell grew up in the spooky city of New Orleans. Other kids were running around outside, but she preferred to stay indoors reading fantasy, folklore and fairy tales and watching all of the animation that she could find. She marveled at the beautiful illustrations by Golden age artists like Dulac and Rackham, and she sank into the worlds created by classic animation artists. Then she would try to draw her own characters and create her own worlds, hoping to illustrate stories herself one day.
When it was time, she went to the University of New Orleans, where she studied Fine Art and graduated with a BFA. There weren’t too many art jobs to be had around New Orleans back then, but she managed to get a job painting Mardi Gras Floats. It was hard and dirty work but she was being paid to paint and learning valuable skills in the process, so she enjoyed it and worked at it for ten years.
Eventually she relocated to Los Angeles and began working as a scenic artist/set painter. She painted backdrops and sets for theater, tv shows, commercials, videos and theme parks. She was happy to be paid to paint once again, but the work was becoming less and less rewarding as time went on.
Then finally, the happy day came when she retired from all that to concentrate on painting her world as she sees it.
(Artist Statement)
Annette Hassell’s paintings came about from her lifelong interest in magical creatures and in magical stories. Fairy tales, folk tales, and mythology, with all of the mystical characters, talking animals, and enchanted objects, are what she refers to for inspiration. She wants her paintings to tell stories, and considers them to be illustrations. Sometimes, the stories are very personal, and sometimes the things that people see in them have little to do with the story that she intended to tell. That’s fine with her, as connecting on some level with other people-that’s the point of storytelling, isn’t it?
Annette uses saturated colors and a sense of whimsy to paint snapshots of scenes perceived out of the corner of her eye. Her paintings of animals and humans exist in a place just far enough removed from the everyday as to seem somewhat magical. Her early love of Golden Age illustrators and animation artists is evident in her detailed rendering of backgrounds where the characters in her paintings live and tell their stories, and she loves that she’s able to share those stories with others.