Collection: Annie Pieper – LUSH

The word LUSH evokes saturated color, density of mark, richness of material, softness, sensuousness…but also gluttony, drunken-ness, overabundance. We are pleasure seekers. This series looks up close at that desire and also steps back to let it become abstract. Flat pattern is layered with depth of field, tempting our natural urge to find form and focal point. The patterns represented in these works are inspired by clothing and objects that have meaning for me, and I am interested in how the aura of that meaning still has a voice when separated from its original context and placed in a new one.

Annie Pieper maintains a studio at Cottonwood Center for the Arts, in Downtown Colorado Springs, where she also serves as its Education Director. Beginning with a B.A. in studio art from Reed College in 1996, Pieper’s creative exploration then took her through an expansive range of practice and mediums, from bronze foundry work in Arizona to delicate restoration of historical structures and art in California. Pieper was part of the team that recreated the original gilding on the dome of San Francisco’s City Hall in 1998, and metal leaf has endured as a primary medium in her paintings to this day. A hallmark of Pieper’s work is her deliberately equal attention paid to both her concept and the materials she uses to manifest it.