Get to Know Anna Núñez: Where Faith Meets Abstract Expression
Anna Núñez in her studio.
When you first step into Anna Núñez’s world, you notice how naturally faith and creativity move together. Her gestural mixed-media abstractions feel like conversations between spirit and color, between intention and release. Through paint, pastels, and pencil, she turns prayers, scripture reflections, and emotional experiences into visual language. Every mark carries a sense of surrender, curiosity, and devotion.
As you explore her work, you start to see how much of her practice comes from a place of humility and trust. Núñez approaches a large canvas with the attitude of both a servant and a child at play, letting the process guide her. She works with reverence, believing creativity comes through her rather than from her, which gives her paintings a sense of openness and spiritual grounding. In her hands, abstract expression becomes a space where you can experience the intersection of faith, mystery, and artistic freedom.
Key Takeaways
- Anna Núñez creates gestural mixed-media abstractions rooted in faith, surrender, and childlike creativity, turning prayers and spiritual reflections into expressive visual language.
- Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, she holds a BFA in studio art and shifted from a six-year graphic design career to full-time painting in 2022.
- Her practice blends Christian spirituality with intuitive mark-making, approaching each canvas with humility, curiosity, and a sense of divine guidance.
- Núñez’s career is growing through collaborations like her 2025 Anthropologie collection, representation with Sugarlift NYC, and exhibitions, including the Orlando Museum of Art.
Inside the Artist: Finding Her Voice in Faith and Color
As you learn more about Anna Núñez, you see how deeply her work is rooted in both devotion and exploration. Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, she creates gestural abstractions shaped by spiritual reflection and creative instinct. Her marks respond to prayer, scripture, and the emotional layers of faith, often exploring themes like control, release, trust, and childlike wonder. The mixed-media textures and expressive movement in her work grow from this honest engagement with her spiritual life.
Her artistic path unfolded over time. After earning her BFA at Florida Gulf Coast University, Núñez spent six years building a successful graphic design and branding business. Even then, she felt a consistent pull toward painting, though it remained something she planned to return to someday. That changed in 2021, when she realized how much of her creative self she had set aside. The shift led her to commit fully to painting in 2022. Since then, her work has reached collectors around the world and evolved into a fine-art practice shaped by a strong sense of calling.
The Creative Pulse Behind Anna Núñez’s Work
At the heart of Anna Núñez’s practice is a blend of faith, intuition, and expressive mark-making. Her paintings grow out of spiritual reflection, emotional honesty, and a deep trust in the creative process, giving each piece its sense of movement, depth, and devotion.
Faith as Creative Foundation
For Núñez, creativity is inseparable from faith. She sees it as a gift entrusted to her, something to approach with humility and reverence. When she paints, she treats the process as a form of devotion, allowing the work to point back to God rather than to herself. This posture gives her pieces an atmosphere of openness and spiritual grounding.
Turning Prayers Into Paint
Many of her compositions begin as moments of prayer. The marks she places on the canvas mirror emotional or spiritual reflections, creating a visual language shaped by scripture, gratitude, longing, or surrender. Rather than illustrating stories, she translates what those moments feel like.
Control and Release: A Spiritual Practice
Much of her process revolves around the tension between holding on and letting go. She moves between intentional mark-making and spontaneous expression, trusting the canvas to reveal something meaningful. The resulting compositions often echo the experience of surrender, where purpose and release work together.
Painting With Reverence and Play
Núñez talks about approaching each canvas as both a servant and a child. That mix of discipline and wonder gives her work its distinctive energy. Large canvases especially allow her to move freely, shifting between careful placement and joyful play.
Letting Color Speak Emotion
Color plays a central role in how she communicates. Her palettes often reflect emotional or spiritual states, using quiet tones for reflection or brighter combinations for themes of joy, hope, and renewal. She pays close attention to how colors interact, allowing unexpected pairings to create depth and emotion.
The Tactile Language of Mixed Media
Mixed media is where her work comes to life. Layers of paint, pastel, and pencil build texture and movement, giving each piece a physical presence. The tactile quality is part of how she connects emotionally to the work, using these materials to capture both stillness and energy.
Artistic Influences and Inspirations
Anna’s art sits comfortably within the world of abstract expression, yet her perspective is deeply personal. She draws from a range of artists who explored gesture and color in their own ways, then filters those influences through her faith and experience.
Cy Twombly’s Gestural Poetry
From Cy Twombly, Anna borrows a love of loose, scribbled marks and a sense that drawing can feel like handwriting. His ability to make a simple line feel emotional or mysterious is evident in his own gestural language, where quick strokes and looping marks suggest thoughts and whispers rather than clear outlines.
Helen Frankenthaler’s Color and Flow
Helen Frankenthaler’s poured color fields and soft transitions show up in Anna’s gentle washes and atmospheric passages. She is drawn to the way Frankenthaler allowed paint to soak and spread, creating moods rather than precise forms. In Anna’s work, similar flows of color help hold space for feeling and reflection.
Josef Albers and the Conversation of Color
Josef Albers’s careful studies of hue and interaction deepen Anna’s sensitivity to how colors affect one another. She pays close attention to how a bright coral might shift when placed beside a cool blue, or how a soft neutral can calm a louder palette. This awareness helps her create paintings that feel balanced, even when the gestures are wild and free.
Recognition and Reach: From Gallery Walls to Global Collectors
Since stepping into painting full-time, Anna has quickly found an audience who connects with the honesty and warmth in her work. Her practice now spans gallery representation, retail collaborations, and collectors across the world.
Anthropologie Print Collection (2025)
In early 2025, Anna’s work joined the Artfully Walls x Anthropologie collection, bringing her abstractions into homes on a wider scale. The collaboration introduced her faith-centered, intuitive style to a national audience, showing how spiritual and emotional artwork can live comfortably within everyday interiors.
Sugarlift Gallery
Representation with Sugarlift, a respected New York gallery, places Anna’s paintings within a thoughtful contemporary program. This partnership connects her with collectors who value both the visual sophistication of her work and the sincerity behind it, and it gives her a presence in one of the most influential art markets.
PLATFORM at Orlando Museum of Art (2023)
Her inclusion in the PLATFORM exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art signaled early institutional recognition. Showing alongside other contemporary artists helped affirm that her voice, grounded in faith and abstraction, speaks clearly within the broader conversation of current art.
SOFT AF International Exhibition (2022)
Shortly after her career pivot, Anna participated in SOFT AF in Heidelberg, Germany, an exhibition that celebrated vulnerability and softness. Her work’s gentle palettes and open-hearted gestures fit naturally within that context, reinforcing her connection to a global community of artists.
A Growing Global Collecting Base
Today, Anna’s paintings and prints live in homes across the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Singapore, and the Philippines. Collectors respond to the emotional accessibility of her work and the way it quietly carries themes of hope, trust, and devotion into daily life.
Standout Works by Anna Núñez
Anna Núñez’s paintings are deeply personal, yet they invite your own stories to unfold inside them. These selected works reveal the intimate links between her faith, family, and daily life, and the way she translates those threads into color and gesture.
Knit Together
Knit Together is inspired by Anna’s mother and the creative home she built for her children. The surface is filled with soft, repeating strokes that feel almost woven, like threads pulling inward and holding together. The gentle neutrals and small flashes of color speak to care that is steady rather than loud, and to the quiet ways we are shaped by the people who raised us.
Sunrise
Sunrise reflects the bright, warm skies of her Florida home. Washes of peach, gold, and soft light move across the composition, like morning slowly taking over the horizon. The piece feels both restful and expectant, offering a sense of fresh mercy and new beginnings. It is the kind of work that can lift a room without needing to shout.
Flowers for Jesús
Originally painted as a gift for her husband on their seventh wedding anniversary, Flowers for Jesús carries the tenderness of a personal offering. The composition blooms with joyful marks and layered color, suggesting a bouquet without describing every petal. It reads as both a love letter and an act of worship, an image of beauty held out with open hands.
Garden Party
Garden Party grows out of her sister’s thriving garden. Lush greens and soft petals of color mingle and overlap, creating a scene that feels full of life and conversation. You can almost imagine voices, leaves, and laughter sharing the same air. It brings the sense of a gathering outdoors into an interior space.
Hurry and Wait
Painted in the early days of setting up her studio, Hurry and Wait marks the moment Anna began to treat her art career with serious intention. Loose, carefree marks dance across the surface in bright, hopeful colors, while softer passages hint at the uncertainty beneath a big decision. The piece holds the feeling of stepping out in faith, not knowing exactly what comes next, but choosing to move anyway.
The Transition: From Graphic Design to Fine Art
Anna’s path from design studio to painting studio is an important part of her story and an echo of the themes in her work, especially trust and surrender.
Six Years Building a Design Career
After graduating, she spent six years running a branding agency and teaching design. She learned how to speak visually for other people’s businesses, how to manage projects, and how to build a professional life. Yet painting remained in the background, a quiet reminder of something more personal she wanted to explore.
The 2021 Epiphany
In 2021, she realized that her deepest creative passion had been waiting too long. That realization arrived with a sense of urgency and clarity. Life felt too short to keep delaying the work that made her feel most alive. Painting could no longer stay on the sidelines.
The 2022 Leap
By 2022, Anna decided to step fully into her studio practice. Leaving behind a successful design career was a significant risk, but it aligned with the same themes of trust and surrender that appear in her paintings. She chose to believe that following this call would open doors she could not yet see.
From Side Passion to Primary Calling
What had once been a side project became the center of her professional and spiritual life. The shift brought her practice into harmony with her beliefs, allowing her to live out the same courage, faith, and openness that her paintings encourage in others.
How to Style Your Home With Anna Núñez’s Art
Bringing Anna’s work into your home is a way to invite softness, reflection, and joy into everyday spaces. Her prints work beautifully in rooms that benefit from a gentle focal point rather than a loud statement.
In bedrooms or quiet corners, choose pieces with calmer palettes and flowing gestures to create a sense of rest. In living rooms or creative spaces, you might lean into works with bolder color notes that spark conversation and energy. Her art pairs naturally with materials like light wood, linen, and clay, which echo the organic feeling of her marks.
Because her surfaces are layered and textural, warm lighting is helpful. A table lamp or wall light that grazes the surface will bring out subtle details in the mixed media. You can hang a single piece as a contemplative anchor, or build a small grouping that repeats a few key colors across the room for gentle cohesion.
Bring Faith and Light Into Your Home With Anna Núñez’s Art
Living with Anna Núñez’s art is a way to keep a sense of faith, hope, and quiet courage close at hand. Her gestural abstractions sit comfortably in contemporary interiors, yet they carry something deeper than pattern or color alone. Each piece feels like a visual breath, a pause that invites you to reflect and reconnect.
From her faith-centered creative process and bold career pivot to her growing recognition and the intimate stories behind individual works, Anna’s practice shows how art can serve as both expression and prayer. Her paintings offer not only beauty for your walls, but also space for contemplation and a gentle reminder of what matters most in your everyday surroundings.
Art included: Rhythms of Grace by Anna Núñez
Published on: December 01, 2025 Modified on: December 02, 2025 By: Artfully Walls
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