Anna Sparks

Anna Sparks is a mixed media artist, designer, photographer, and all-around 'arranger' of things. She combines her love for traveling, visual storytelling, and collecting things with her desire to spread a message and document the changing environment.

From a young age, she was drawn to graffiti and street art, copying famous women graffiti writers in her sketchbook such as Lady Pink, Swoon, and Claw Money—now that style has evolved into her mixed media works, incorporating more stencils and layers of paint on canvas.

In these mixed media pieces, she tries to use found materials as much as possible, often picking up trash off the ground or from junk piles. Intuitively approaching the canvas, her compositions include recycled elements, vintage National Geographic magazines, newspapers, and other found items into abstract compositions or designs. She likes to combine aspects of her own photographs, collages, oil pastel crayons, textured paint, and pens into her acrylic works on canvas, panels, or paper. Additionally, she uses layers as means to create texture and depth, lines to evocate emotion, and finds the relation to society always present. She is also a music aficionado and is inspired by jazz artists like Brandee Younger, Miles Davis, and Kassa Overall.

As a street and culture photo documentarian, she approaches her subjects with respect, grace, and understanding. She finds her eye drawn to lines and colors that create balanced and asymmetrical compositions in the frame. Rarely she does post-edit her photographs as she loves experimenting with analog methods and relishes finding tiny surprises in the film, including light leaks and double exposures.