Anna Wallace

Anna Wallace, featured in the Time Capsule exhibition, is a Nashville-based watercolor artist whose work centers on the human hand as a subject of intimacy, memory, and expression. Formally trained at the Savannah College of Art and Design in graphic design and science illustration, Wallace brings a detail-oriented, process-driven practice to fine art painting that is deeply rooted in observation. A lifelong fascination with hands grew from childhood, shaped by her brother's experience with Cerebral Palsy and a heightened awareness of what hands communicate beyond words.

Wallace works primarily on panel using her own clayboard recipe, a surface that lends her watercolors an unusual brightness, texture, and depth not achievable on traditional paper. Her compositions are spare and focused, allowing the hand to carry the full weight of the emotional narrative. Her work has been exhibited at The Butcher Gallery and Gutstein Gallery in Savannah, and in Nashville through pop-up exhibitions, Soundwaves Gallery, The Garden of Earthly Delights Gala and Exhibition 2026 at Coop Gallery, Arcade Arts’ Art Between the Avenues Exhibition, and was recently selected to complete a painting for Nashville Youth Campus for Empowerment’s permanent collection.


Artist Statement

Ten years ago, I left a promising painting career to follow my husband into the music industry. I told myself it was temporary. It wasn't. What followed was a decade of chaos, professional reinvention, and eventually, the kind of collapse that makes you question everything you thought you were building toward. The marriage ended, the band dissolved, the career I'd constructed in design and entertainment went with it.

When I finally picked up a brush again two years ago, I hadn't painted in five years. My first attempts were humbling. But I kept going, because I needed somewhere to put the questions I couldn't answer out loud: Is time truly lost? Why did life happen this way? What do I really want and what is my purpose?

I returned to painting hands, the subject that debuted at my first solo show ten years ago, but this time they were my own. Painting my own hands became the only honest way to wrestle with questions that, truly, only I could answer. I developed a new surface to match, a clayboard recipe of my own on wood panels, something I had never attempted before. Where watercolor paper demands commitment to every mark, clayboard offers forgiveness. I could wipe it away and begin again, which turned out to be exactly what I needed.


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