Ana Santiago
Ana Santiago is a painter known for site-specific bodies of work — paintings built around the character of a place or the brief behind a commission. Her work is held in private collections across North America and beyond.
Ana Santiago paints from observation and from memory — the report and the reverie, side by side on the same canvas. Cleanly drawn line over washes of oil and ink, populated with the people, weather, and architecture of the places she works.
Her practice is site-specific: each body of work is built around a particular place or commission — the architecture of a space, the brief behind an event, the character of a room. Recent commissions include In Ordinary Light, marking two hundred years of diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico, and Eternal Bloom, which launched the gallery at Saks Fifth Avenue, Scottsdale.
The work is collected privately and shown both in gallery settings and within the residential, hospitality, and retail projects it is made for. Santiago is currently represented privately; collection inquiries and commissions are accepted through this studio.
"Santiago has a particular gift for the noon hour — for what light does to a wall, a body, a flag. The work feels both witnessed and remembered."
Santiago's practice is organised around places and commissions rather than a single studio. Each body of work begins on site — in a market, a plaza, a room, a retail floor — with quick line drawings made from life, often in under two minutes.
The drawings are finished slowly in oil and ink back in the studio, sometimes over several months. The work is small in production volume by design: a considered number of paintings a year, each tied to the space or occasion it was made for.