Annie Stiles-Heller is an Alameda artist who has been an art teacher for nearly 35 years. As an elementary and middle-school teacher, as a director of private art camps, and as an instructor for adult painting classes, her mission has always been to snap the creative synapses of her students.
She aims to work in a Flow State and loves that watery metaphor: Jumping into the moving water, bumping over rocks of unseen obstacles, and being carried in rushing waters into exciting new territories. Those experiments and a deep love of nature guide her daily painting practice.
Emily Heller is an Alameda-born comedian and TV writer. Her television credits include shows like Barry, Search Party, People of Earth, and Medical Police. Her stand up has been featured on Conan, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Late Late Show with James Corden, as well as in her own hour-long Comedy Central special Ice Thickeners. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and her dog.
Annie Heller’s Artwork
Impressionist Trees
2021, oil on Ampersand Board, 2021. 14″ x 18″
$600
Yosemite
2021, oil on Ampersand Board. 14″ x 18″
$450
Jewel Lake
2020, aluminum composite. 16″ x 20″
$550
By Emily Heller
Please visit the K Gallery at Rhythmix to view the artwork referenced in Emily’s writing. Please see the Main Gallery page for K Gallery hours.
The painting that inspired this collection is one my mother did several years ago, based on a photograph of me as a child. In it, I’m focusing hard on a drawing I’m doing. I’m naked, leaning over my work surface, surrounded by disheveled papers. My mom is an artist and art teacher, and in many ways, this painting is an accurate snapshot of my upbringing; in my mother’s house, there was no wrong time or place for art, no dress code. But that’s not why I love this painting, and it’s not why it hangs in my office. What she captured in this photograph, and then painted, is something it has taken me a lifetime to understand.
When I was 31, I’d forged a career as a comedian and television writer, but I struggled hard with the empty page. My dreams were always bigger than my output by a huge margin. I had found ways around the struggle. Audiences helped. Bouncing my ideas off of rooms full of other writers helped. But despite my successes, I was tallying up failures no one knew about, and they were causing me to spiral. Then, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder – ADHD. I started to understand why I was such a mess; why my desk was always piled with papers; why I fidgeted and spaced out; why I couldn’t just will myself to sit down and make my art. Finally, I figured out why it was so hard for me to return to the mindset of the little girl at the table, so focused on her work that she doesn’t even notice the camera.
It surprises a lot of people to learn that people with ADHD aren’t incapable of focus. In fact, when something interests us, we tend to hyperfocus on it, sometimes not even stopping to take care of urgent needs like eating, sleeping, or, as you can see depicted in this painting, putting on clothes or using the restroom (this is my classic childhood ‘holding it in’ stance). Hyperfocus feels incredible, especially compared to the way the disorder can make me feel otherwise. I’ve spent my life see-sawing between that elusive, wonderful flow state, and what felt like utter uselessness, unable to find my way back.
In the four years since my diagnosis, I’ve been learning how to manage my ADHD. I know now that I can’t just wander into a sunbeam and start drawing. I’ve learned to give myself space and structure, to experiment and tinker with what works, and to stop punishing myself for who I’ve always been. I make schedules, I break larger projects up into smaller tasks, and I have a notebook dedicated to keeping track of what inspires me to focus. One of my investments in this process has been setting up my home office, where I’ve surrounded myself with images and objects that put me in the right mindset, including this painting. It’s a reminder that I can, and will, create art, even if I have to keep learning how to do it in new ways. I know this learning is possible because even after many decades as an artist, my mom, the art teacher, has never stopped learning. She’s still taking classes, broadening her skills, and finding her way back to her own flow.
For this show, I asked my mom to do an updated version of this painting. I posed in my office, where the first painting hangs, and where I do my writing now. I also asked her to give herself the same treatment: to paint a portrait of herself when she was younger, locked in the creative process, and another of herself today, however she wanted to capture herself.