Ainsley Lundeen portrait

About

Photo courtesy of Google Meet ;)

After an unfortunately early ending to her classical dance career due to a back injury as a teenager, Ainsley began drawing at university in what she now views as a fortuitous beginning. She quickly took to visual art as a replacement for her creative outlet, finding it gives her a similar sense of flow—the feeling of focus, where the rest of the world slips away for a few hours—as dance.

Born and raised in San Francisco, CA, she lived internationally for about eight years beginning at age 18, including time in Paris, Florence, and Melbourne. Curious about the interconnectedness between fields, she majored in Literary Studies and the Creative Arts at the American University of Paris, which combined comparative literature with studio art. She went on to complete her Master’s in Management for Artistic and Cultural Events at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence.

She draws inspiration from her immediate surroundings, finding significance in the everyday. Her friendships, nature walks, and current music and literary interests are what power her design, with a love and playfulness of color and movement rising to the foreground. Her method is varied, but lately begins from a starting point—an image, a song, a memory, a shadow—where, through a series of marks and erasures, each piece begins to take on a life of its own, and she intuitively follows along. Many of her pieces come with prose or a poem, to complement them. The understanding of where things meet, how they relate or overlap, and what they take with them from the encounter is central to both her life and work. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.