Anna Schroedel, PLS class of 2024, turned to painting amidst the upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic to process feelings of isolation and turbulence. At this time, she was uprooted from her life in Hawai’i and was stuck in Minnesota, where her family had recently moved. She missed the plants, the animals, and the fragrant salty air of her former home. She missed wandering barefoot outside throughout the year and gazing in awe at the abundant natural beauty. It was a place where humanity and nature were not separate, but kin. Out of this longing, she did her first “window to home”—a painting of the view down the driveway of her childhood home which brought this cherished world back. It was a window to the land she so missed. Her paintings became a vista on another world, one with familiar trees shrouded in vibrant light, one where nature ran wild. As the years went on, Anna kept painting. As the daughter of an Eastern Orthodox priest and a hospice chaplain/grief counselor, she was raised to recognize the constant reminders of the spiritual aspects of life. Eastern Orthodox iconography shaped her view of art, and her paintings became glimpses of a transfigured world—or, at least, a testament to the longing of one.
Coming into her senior year, Anna was immediately drawn to the creative option for a PLS thesis. She took it as an opportunity to grow as an artist and to articulate the influences of her work with the support of scholars. With the co-supervision of Professor Katie Bugyis (PLS) and Professor Maria Tomasula (painting), her thesis came together in two parts: an extended artist statement and a series of twelve paintings. The fruits of her work were placed on display in the PLS suite at the end of the year.
Anna completed the paintings featured in her thesis during her junior and senior years at Notre Dame. They depict imaginative landscapes and reflect both engrained influences and lived experiences. The images appear in her mind, and she does her best to bring them onto the canvas. The paintings in her thesis correspond to the story she tells in the extended artist’s statement; as she wrote, she wove in pictures of the paintings where they fit in with the whole. While they are varied in both size and appearance, the paintings work together to share a sacramental view of the world and a longing for harmony.
Anna’s four years in PLS have strengthened her views on the role of beauty and the pursuit of goodness that is inherent in the human experience. Immersion in the intellectual history of the world has provided her with good company to understand how a good and ordered conception of the cosmos can help to address the current crisis of humanity’s alienation from the natural world. She thinks of Plato’s three transcendentals–goodness, truth and beauty–and affirms her draw towards beauty. She thinks of Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching as a guide for living with openness, and of the call to the wild in Melville’s Moby Dick, in Thoreau’s Walden, and of the moments in Tolstoy’s War and Peace when Prince Andrew looks up at the sky and is overcome with a sense of peace. She thinks of the yearning for love in Sappho’s poems, in Plato’s Symposium, in Shakespeare’s plays. She thinks of the alienation of humanity with Marx’s Das Kapital and with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She thinks of Dosteyevsky’s portrayal of overwhelming evil and one good memory that can keep a heart warm through it all in The Brothers Karamazov. She thinks of her life as a woman with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Emily Dickenson’s poems, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the countless instances of sexism throughout the Great Books. Finally, Anna reflects the role of the artist with Heidegger, with Neitzche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own…her lists are endless. It is through PLS that Anna’s view of the world has been challenged and strengthened, and her paintings are supported in their exploration of the deeply human questions of love, death, longing, and our place within creation.
Following graduation, Anna is moving to New York City to pursue a career in the art world. After completing her thesis, she has the framework with which to move forward in deeping the connection between her intellectual pursuits and the visual world she will continue to create. To follow her journey, please visit Anna on Instagram @annapepperstudio or at her website, www.annapepper.com.