Today we’d like to introduce you to Anna Núñez.
Anna, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember. From the finger painting days, leading up to college – the ideas and dreams were always growing, evolving, taking shape in the form of new art projects. When it came time to attend a university, I chose to study Studio Art at FGCU and continued all the way through with a passion for the work that I was getting to create. I picked up Marketing and Advertising minors along the way, and I think that this was one of the best choices I made there.
It was around my junior year of school that drawing and graphic design unexpectedly rose to the surface of my interests when an opportunity to open an online shop, selling prints, came around. I was super broke and figured I could begin putting my illustrations out into the world in hopes that someone might be interested in purchasing prints. I made a connection online with a branding agency in St. Petersburg (my hometown) around that same time, and in the summer, I began an internship with them that essentially propelled me onto this path I now walk as a freelance artist and graphic designer.
With specialized talents and offerings in illustration, branding, styling, photography and painting. It wasn’t all a breeze to get to where I am now – but I’m pretty stoked about how things have panned out so far.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
It’s difficult to pinpoint my artwork as being any one thing because I really love to express my creative voice through a variety of media. When I draw, paint, photograph, style, design – I can identify a very strong gravitation to the use of linear strokes, marks or arrangements. I am almost always working with lighter, warmer color tones – and seeking a strong sense of balance and harmony within a composition. Clean, modern styles – that are combined with organic mark-making or hand-lettered designs – seem to scratch the personal itch to find a balance between what is controlled and what is unpredictable in life.
When my art becomes a tool to help pay my bills, however, is when I can see some of these inspirations and influences step aside a little bit, in order to blend with that of a unique client. A professor once told me that “art is for yourself, and design is for someone else”. I’d like to think that I can have the best of both worlds, and marry these two concepts a little bit more throughout my career as a working artist and designer.
Whenever people see my work or my art – the hope is only that they might be able to identify that the work came from my hands/ my voice. Any other takeaway is completely up to them.
What do you know now that you wished you had learned earlier?
I love sharing my experiences and personal lessons with fellow artists, in the instance that it might be of any encouragement – so this is something that I could write on and on about for days. To keep things simple and sweet, I’ll just share the reminder that good things take time. If I didn’t start taking steps towards my goals, I wouldn’t be where I am today. And I’ve learned that even the tiniest of baby steps STILL count as steps! It just takes one day at a time, one drawing at a time, one painting at a time, in order to set myself in motion towards these dreams of mine.
I’ve also learned how important it is to SHARE your work – and to do so without a need for the work to be perfect first. To quote Elizabeth Gilbert in ‘Big Magic’, “I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear”. And the idea that one must wait until things are perfect before sharing their work with others, is one that will suck the fun out of an endeavor before it can even really begin.
And it’s never, ever too late to begin something that you love. It may not pay the bills now. But one day it might, and that’s only if you take the first step now.
Contact Info:
- Website: cheznunez.com
- Instagram: @annannunez
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