The Dahlia

Ansley is a native of San Diego, but she spent the first part of her adult life traveling throughout Europe and the Middle East.  Ansley attended La Sorbonne in Paris, and after an ill-fated trip to Lebanon in 1983, she returned to San Diego.  It was there where her life took a distinguishing turn.  Ansley was diagnosed with MS at the age of 29. Upon the realization that her life was never to be the same, Ansley began her journey as a professional artist. As a professional artist, she focused on the shapes and colors in the natural world around her, and the subject matter reflected her personal struggle with MS. She became well known for painting leaves and fruit in a sensual way but always with the marks of time and damage.  It is the uniqueness of the blemishes that allows Ansley to see the beauty.

Ansley was attracted to the abstract in nature that is caused by the weather of time. She incorporates abstraction with her botanical work with random marks of lines and splatters that represent the patterns and marks left behind on each of us from our own life events.  As Ansley continued with her work she expanded her work by adding texture  and created a series of pure textural abstract works that rely on color and composition. Her work is focused on the abstract nature of color and texture on inanimate objects in an abstracted environment and the abstraction in the up-close view of the natural botanical world. In her images, she blends reality with her own unique interpretation of textural abstracts and botanical still life work. In both Ansley’s abstracts and abstract botanical/still-life work, she continues to be true to her exploration of color, texture, and composition.