Kirsten Anderson

Kirsten is an award winning plein air artist from Long Beach, California and becoming nationally recognized. She believes in the basic principles of representational art as a base for the spontaneity of plein air painting.  Kirsten has recently started exploring clay and sculpture and her ceramic rabbits have grown very popular this last year.

Anderson attended Occidental College for her ABA and Cal State Long Beach for her training in art.  She has travelled with her palette and sketchbook on 6 continents and her paintings are a personal diary of her travels.

Raised in California, Kirsten  says her favorite subjects are found along the coast, on the water, or in the water.

Anderson’s plein-air landscape and figurative work is an extension of her commercial-art background—she supplied California Pizza Kitchen with literally thousands of original paintings on 10-inch pizza boxes, featuring ingredients used in its restaurants. “A fax order for 100 boxes would come in,” Anderson says, “and 10 minutes later another order for another 100.” Working fast to keep up with these orders developed her skill and technique, and it’s the kind of painting she still prefers today. As a full-time radiation therapist, she feels her work complements her art and vice versa, by making her solve problems and think in three dimensions when working in two. Because she has a full-time job, she says, “I only paint really solidly a few weeks a year, but I feel like my work grows in leaps and bounds.”

Anderson says that her plein-air work is about developing her skills and catching the light in that three-hour window before it changes. She endeavors to create beautiful paintings that elicit an emotional response from the viewer. Anderson is represented by Debra Huse Gallery, Balboa Island, CA; The Store at Crystal Cove, Newport Coast, CA; Tumbleweed Trading Post, Borrego Springs, CA; and Portico Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA. —Laura Rintala– Soutwest Art Magazine, CELEBRATING FEMALE ARTISTS–2014

 I am also included in an article titled “The New Naturalists” by Ann Japenga, http://www.californiadesertart.com/?p=1588.  She describes my work as  “brainy, ceaselessly reaching paintings incorporating her wide interests in history, mythology, environment, science and nature,” and describes me as “a renaissance person who likes to paint.”