Annika Gustafsson is happiest hanging out in her yard, a can of spray-paint in hand. The artist is building a name for herself with her creative and quirky use of unusual art mediums where she builds unique colors and texture that beg to be touched.
Gustafsson grew up in Sonoma and fell in love with creating art at a very young age. While attending after-school art programs at Flowery Elementary, longtime Valley art teacher Gayle Manfre got her excited about painting, especially watercolors.
At Sonoma Valley High School her peers voted her Most Artistic. She worked at the art supply store Riley Street in Santa Rosa and took lots of their classes. Her senior year she won a scholarship for an art project that was showcased at the now-defunct Sonoma Salute to the Arts Festival in the Plaza.
Back then Gustafsson was drawing and painting all the time but wouldn’t call herself an artist. She was simply doing what made her happy: being creative and following her pure inspiration. It was only the beginning. That creativity would continue to flow from her fingertips, helping her to construct a world where she could be sublimely happy, working as an artist.
She studied art direction at The Academy of Art in San Francisco and she’s been a prop stylist for Julie Atwood Events for close to a decade. She’s designed labels for local wine and olive oil companies, like Finnella Winery. She’s also done custom work for Elaine Bell, SIGH and Landry Farm & Ranch Management.
Gustafsson also continued creating artwork in her spare time.
“I wanted to paint, I needed to paint, really,” she said. “Some people feel the need to organize their books or their houses, or people have things that they have to do, like it’s just in them. That’s painting for me.”
It's almost habitual, a need that lives inside her.
“Like, I’ll be brushing my teeth, walking through my living room and look at a painting and then it’s, ‘Okay, I know exactly what this needs,’ and 30 minutes later I’m still in front of the painting, using the blue paint on it that I thought it needed, with the toothbrush in my mouth,” she said.
She likes using what’s on hand and easy to get to when she feels inspired. She’s particularly fond of spray paint. It began as an inexpensive medium that she’d pick up at Parson’s Lumber and it turned into a way to make amazing things happen on a canvas.
“Now I’m at Parsons between one and four times a week buying paints,” she said.
She’s drawn to less conventional mediums.
“I used to do a lot of feather paintings on old pieces of barnwood. I would use caulking, like you’re gonna caulk your bathtub. I would use that and like spread it out in a way that it looks like a feather and then I’d hit it with spray paint, because that was the easiest way to get the shadows that I wanted.”
She first used caulking because she didn’t have any other art supplies at the time, but felt compelled to paint in the middle of the night. When she’s inspired she doesn’t want to stop and go to the store to get things, so she says she’ll just use whatever’s around her.
“I’ve used nail polish in paintings, because it’s just enamel,” she said. “I’ve also used ink, watercolors, alcohols and a lot of house paint.”
This industrial mix makes some of her work safe to hang outdoors.
One of her mediums, isopropyl alcohol, a key element in hand sanitizer, became hard to find during the pandemic.
“When you drip that onto certain paints or ink, it will create different patterns or separate paints so that lower layers can get pulled up to the surface,” she said.
In the zone, she lets her inspirations and the paints lead her.
“A lot of it is just playing around with what the different types of paint will do, like the way that they will react to each other,” she said. “I fall in love with a certain type of blue or a certain texture that I get from, I don’t know, like mixing rusty metal primer with beige milk paint and it does the coolest things, like making opalescent swirls,” she said.
She has painted abandoned buildings around Sonoma including an old dance hall.
“It was fallen down and condemned and I just loved it, the texture,” she said. “I took a can of iron paint, which smells like rotting fish. It's one of the worst smells, but it makes the coolest black that I’ve seen and it can oxidize.”
She’s fond of painting skulls. They came about when she was doing portraits and wasn’t happy with the way they were turning out.
“I decided that I needed to scrape the paint back down to the bones, the skull, so I could correct the placement of the facial features and then I liked the way they looked like that,” she said.
Some of her work depicts images of animals. “One night I decided I wanted to paint a life-sized miniature donkey,” she said. “I used caulking on the head and on the tail. When it dried it was like super thick texture and you could touch its head and feel it and you could touch its tail and feel it. When I finished it I loved it so much that I decided I wanted a herd.”
She kept painting more donkeys, building her herd, but it took her a while because the pieces kept selling.
“With my art, so much of it is texture,” she said. “I feel like it should be seen in person and touched.” She had her art up in the frozen yogurt shop Top That, with signs that read, “please touch the art.”
She’s had her work displayed in quite a few places around Sonoma like Barking Dog Roasters, Jacob’s Restaurant and Sandbox. She had a booth in the Plaza during the 2019 New Art Exhibition. As the restrictions are lifting, she’s searching for her next public wall space.
Selling her work is still a somewhat new concept. She enjoyed just hanging out in her yard and painting, but friends hounded her that she was missing an opportunity to capitalize on her popular work.
She finally took the plunge when she turned 30. It was a good move. She began putting her work up on Instagram where it often sells in hours. She also gets lots of requests for commissioned work. She signs her art with her age and now at 37 she has a lot of numbered pieces hanging on the walls of local art lovers’ homes.
“I realize now that people do want my art, which encourages me to paint more of the weird stuff that I paint for myself,” she said. “Really, I’m just a selfish little kid that likes hanging out at home all alone playing with colors. I mean that’s really it. My phone’s turned off, I’m all alone, spray painting in my yard.”
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