Anne Schreivogl was born and raised in Seattle and received her BFA from Western Washington University in Bellingham in 1994. She also attended the Seattle Academy of Fine Art — now Gage Academy — as an arts grant recipient of the Anacortes Arts Foundation, and studied with Northwest painter Alfred Currier from 1998 to 2002. Her studio practice is primarily acrylic; she also paints plein air oil landscapes in an Impressionistic mode. She carries a sketchpad consistently — through study in France, teaching English in Japan, and a bicycle crossing of the United States.
The subjects are birds on wires, animals in repose, figures caught mid-gesture — everyday moments rendered with flat, saturated color and clean edge decisions. Her last name, Schreivogl, is German for “screeching bird,” and she is, by her own account, allergic to birds; they appear throughout her paintings anyway. In Unruffled, The composition layers cadmium yellow ochre across the entire ground in horizontal striations, over which cobalt and prussian blue geometric patterns and birdhouses assert themselves, punctuated by alizarin reds and yellows that form stylized flowers and a black bird in flight. The technique employs dry-brush acrylic with visible pen or marker line-work, creating a deliberately flat, non-illusionistic surface where pattern competes equally with form across every inch. The relentless decorative density—no breathing room, no hierarchy—produces a visual saturation that paradoxically flattens spatial depth, making the canvas feel more like applied ornament than a window into pictorial space. In Into The Field of Sunflowers, The painter builds her composition in zincwhite and raw sienna, laying the Adirondack chair's slats with deliberate horizontal bands while the birdhouse pole and sunflower stalks—rendered in burnt umber and ochre—create a staccato vertical rhythm against the blue-grey horizon. Acrylic's flat opacity serves the work well here, allowing crisp edges between the chair's cushion pattern and the surrounding field, though the technique risks a somewhat poster-like quality that flattens spatial recession. The composition tilts toward anecdote rather than formal resolution: the bird perched on the birdhouse, the scattered seeds, the waiting chair—these narrative elements compete visually rather than cohere into a sustained pictorial argument. In So Innocent, A dachshund rendered in cadmium orange and alizarin crimson with chrome yellow spots lies prone on a cobalt blue blanket patterned in white, while the background employs a geometric color-field grid of ochre, zinc yellow, and slate gray. The artist employs thick, deliberate acrylic with visible brushwork that flattens form into decorative pattern, particularly in the dog's scaled musculature and the blanket's schematic weave. The title's irony cuts against the painting's earnest formal treatment—this beast, rendered monumental and architectural through the artist's constructivist palette, reads less as innocent creature than as an object of formal inquiry, the sentimentality of pet portraiture stripped bare by chromatic boldness and compositional severity. The work is observational at its core — not abstracted, not idealized, but attentive to the specific posture of a thing at rest.
In 2012, Schreivogl created 40 cherry blossom paintings for Japanese citizens displaced by the March 11, 2011 tsunami, which she hand-delivered to temporary housing communities one year after the disaster. Her first art museum solo, “Meditative Exuberance,” opened at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in March 2018. She has been selected “Best of the West” for the Northwest by Southwest Art magazine (August 2006) and featured in American Art Collector (October 2009). Her work is in the collections of the Seattle Aquarium, Island Hospital, Anacortes Public Library, and Lambiel Museum.
With my art, I seek to transmit the joy I see and feel in everyday moments onto canvas. Birds perched on wires, chicks with sticks knitting away, and jazz musicians are common motifs. My last name, ‘Schreivogl,’ means ‘screeching bird,’ and birds often find their way into my art.
