Drawing + Painting |

The Cost Of Ecstasy

Anna Faye Woodworth

The Cost of Ecstasy is a body of work exploring the depths of feminine experience, weaving together themes of pleasure and pain. These paintings are an effort to radically and tenderly illuminate the deep wounds that internally live on through generations of women. 

Pleasure
2024
oil and acrylic paint on canvas, 40″x 30″
Birds of Grace
2024
oil and acrylic paint on canvas, 24″x 12″

These paintings explore my own experience as a sensual being, forming loving connections and lustful attachments, feeling both the becoming and destruction that comes along with them. This series embodies both an erotic and violent allegory, illuminating the feminine endurance of polarizing emotions of euphoria and anguish, ecstasy and persecution. 

Cost of Ecstasy I

2024

oil & acrylic paint on canvas, 23″x 35″

Additionally, these works invite the viewer to contemplate their likeness to animal kin, as I use human and animal forms to symbolize the powerful primal instincts held within us all.

oil paintings;

Rabbit, 2023, oil paint on canvas, 35″x 23″

Fox, 2023, oil paint on canvas, 35″x 23″

Awe, 2023, oil paint on stuffed and sewn canvas, 23″ x 35″

Guide, 2024, oil paint on canvas, 5′ x 5.5′

watercolour paintings;

Threat Responses, 2023, watercolour on paper, 4x 11″x15″

(left to right)

Fight, Freeze, Flight, Fawn

INVASIVE, 2024, watercolour on paper, 54″ x 38.5″

This piece deals with the interference of humans in the delicate lives and ecosystems of animals, who are commonly viewed as pests. Specifically within the area of the Pacific Northwest Mainland and Island, the Eastern Grey Squirrel, the Coyote, and the Douglas Fir tree find themselves threatened by urbanization and lack of peaceful interspecies coexistence.

Pigeon of Piece (‘s of Garbage), 2024, watercolour on paper, 11″x 14″

This piece is an ode to a beautiful species, the Pigeon, who are often regarded as pests or vermin in the urban areas they call home.

The title is a play on words with the notorious cousin of the Pigeon, the Dove who are well known as a symbol of peace.

Anna Faye Woodworth

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My artistic expression serves as an exploration of the interconnectedness and sacredness of life on Earth.

I have been gifted with cultivating deep relationships to land, animals, and humans, especially in sisterhood. I am captivated by the internal balance of masculine and feminine, the sacredness of union, and connection. My art delves into the spiritual and psychological likeness of human and non-human animal behaviors, and the intimate relationships within and between species. I seek to express these experiences through bold color pallets, and dramatic dream-like imagery grounded in figures and symbolic narratives.

Ethology and psychology guide much of the thematics of my work, specifically the intricacies of relationships and ecosystems, focusing on instincts, predatory behavior, threat responses and relational care. Influential to my practice are the works of James Jean and Beth Caverner, as well as the Jungian idea of collective unconscious.

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