Annie Hooker
Simple poetry
Although Annie Hooker hails from the bustling city of San Francisco, she finds herself “profoundly magnetized to the visual history of the American West.”
“Having grown up in an urban environment surrounded by concrete, skyscrapers, buses, taxis and traffic, I don’t know how I became so enamored with Western imagery,” she says. “I don’t totally understand it, but I know I am not the only one. There’s romantic mythology in the Western genre that I think anyone who’s attracted to it understands at a cellular level. It just gets under your skin in the best way.”
In Hooker’s upcoming show at Terzian Galleries in Park City, Utah, on view from February 8 to 24, she shares a visual ballad dedicated to the great American frontier.
“The title of my show, Simple Poetry, emerged as a combination of two words that I felt best epitomized what I am aiming to communicate with my artwork,” she explains.
“My paintings are not at all simple from a technical perspective, but their essence and stark compositions are. A poem by nature is a sensation expressed in words. The idea that a deliberately chosen sequence of words chained together can evoke a physical feeling in a person, to me, is magic. ‘Simply poetry’ is also a reference to my recent and repeated use of the notebook paper background. My intention with it is to infer the notion of something being handwritten, made by hand, or the trace of human touch. Who’s to say an elegant poem can’t be written on a piece of scratch paper?”
Front and center in the series are cowboys and cowgirls in poses seen in Spaghetti Westerns.
“My paintings, especially my cowboys and cowgirls, possess affectation and exaggeration in their attitude and postures. I design them to be sort of over-the-top and ‘comic bookesque,’” she says. “I like to think of them as characters frozen in the midst of a film scene where they just flipped over a table in a saloon and are about to challenge the sheriff to a quick draw after losing all their money. There is a lot of fantasizing on my part.”
For her newest body of work, Hooker also amped up the models, expressions, poses and costumes depicted while staying true to the spirit of the Old West.
“I hope that viewers find my artwork
exciting and energetic,” she says. “Western art is a genre of art that has such strong traditional roots of romance and reverie for a specific bygone era. I want my paintings to push on the traditional boundaries just a little, while simultaneously respecting the lineage.”
“I’m sure that most artists would agree that their current body of work is what they are most excited about,” she adds. “That is true for me right now.”