Anneli Skaar
Bio
A first generation American, Anneli Skaar (b. 1969) still holds a strong connection to her ancestral home in Scandinavia. Fluent in Norwegian, she moved to Norway from the San Francisco Bay Area, California, at 18, to attend the National Academy of Arts in Oslo where she received her BA. After a career of working as an illustrator and designer, she debuted her work as a painter in 2014, when she had her first solo show ICEHARDSHIPBEAUTY.
Skaar has participated in residencies at Galleri Svalbard at 78 degrees north in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway in 2015; as well as a residency onboard an EIMSKIP container ship traveling from Portland, ME to Reykjavik, Iceland in 2016. She has gathered material for her work in Ilulissat, Greenland, in 2017, at the site of the largest, active glacier in the northern hemisphere and was awarded the Maine Media Workshop Book Artist in Residency in 2016, for which she produced the fine art book Bears and Ruins. Skaar has also produced numerous talks and articles related to her work and travels in arctic regions. In 2020, her fine press book Nansen's Pastport was published by Two Ponds Press. In 2021, she self-published the fine press book Monarch with a grant from the Maine Arts Commission.
The Island Whale is a collection of nine stories from different parts of the world, from over the course of a thousand years. The excerpts from these stories are about whales being mistaken for islands by unsuspecting sailors who build fires upon their backs before they are pulled down into the depths. Designed to emulate a New England whaling journal in a writing desk from the height of the whaling industry in the 1800s, the book is entirely hand-illustrated with pen nib and AirInk, a newly developed artist ink extracted from carbon pollution. The scrimshaw-like drawings, whale stamps, and hand-painted red rose details within the book suggest the connection of extraction of natural resources to the land sinking below our feet. The case contains a hand-etched sperm whale tooth cast in plastic and a feather pen and rose, both created from paper, crafted by the artist. The Island Whale is boxed and quarterbound by Amy Borezo of Shelter Bookworks with marbled paper by Iris Nevins, letterpress-printed by Art Larson, and with an afterword by Nantucket historian Betsy Tyler.