Meet the Cover Artist

Annie Rochelle is a Knoxville, Tennessee-based artist and an instructor in the Art Studio at Blackberry Mountain. Her art is featured on the cover of The Muse Issue of Blackberry Magazine. Learn more about this captivating piece, inspired by the Great Smoky Mountains, and its creator.

What inspired the art that is featured on the cover of The Muse Issue? Tell us about this piece!
Nocturne is an optical investigation into themes of scale that strives to both celebrate and break traditional painting into refracted color and shape. Inspired by the synchronous firefly display, a natural phenomenon only found in the deep forests of East Tennessee where, despite immense obstacles of time, distance and hazard, fireflies flash en masse in choreographed light shows during the early Summer. I sought to combine the immensity of nature with individual perspective.

Like light caught in a prism, the refracted landscape is not only entrancing, but overwhelming, simultaneously ephemeral and ageless. When seeking source imagery for this project, I knew that the vista from Cat’s Paw Ridge on Blackberry Mountain would fully express this vastness of landscape. In this piece, I wanted to show the landscape in one of her more sublime moods. With a prismatic palette of blue tones, this piece evokes the nocturnal landscape refracted as if the viewer has been dazzled by the full moon and the circus of starlight and fireflies.

You named the piece Nocturne. How do you typically approach choosing a name for a work?
Normally the title comes to me as I work; Nocturne is one of these. A nocturne is also a visual and musical theme, an established subject such as a pastoral or primavera. A nocturne in both music or painting, is an artwork that invokes the dreamy, mysterious pensiveness of nighttime, but edged with the sublime. The title also alludes to the ties my art has in traditional art historical themes.

The magazine cover only shows a section of a much larger piece. How big is the canvas, and what made you want to create this piece on a large scale?
The piece itself is quite large at four feet tall by 12 feet long; it has been painted on six separate wood panels. With this panoramic scale, this artwork immerses the viewer in a velvet Summer night in Appalachia as captured in a prism.

You have several pieces that show off a similar collage-type configuration. How do you describe the artistic style and approach to the pieces in your collection like this?
I have a love for traditional painting techniques and geometric abstract compositions; these paintings are a reflection of this marriage. Recently I have been inspired by the geometry of quilt blocks as well the optical tessellation of kaleidoscopes. This form also allows me to experiment with the juxtaposition of different media and technique. In these works, you can find paired the visceral velvet of oil pastel next to the gilded mirror of gold leaf, the graphic flatness of gouache combined with the pictorial realism of landscape painting, neon with natural, shear with splattered.

What is your muse?
To my mind, the muse is like a ghost that floats through walls. I am inspired by nature, optics, design, materials, texture, art history, color theory and a myriad of other things, of course. But my muse drifts through the compartmentalization of such influences, sometimes lingering, sometimes returning to a theme after years of absence. She is as undefinable as she is compelling and all that I know is that I am curious to see where she takes me.

To see more from Annie Rochelle, follow her on Instagram at @a.e.rochelle and visit aerochelle.com.

View the full digital release of Blackberry Magazine Volume 010.