About Chris + Annie

Chris and Annie were both art majors in college, so that’s how they met. Annie thought Chris was pretty good at art, and Chris thought Annie was basically the greatest artist he’d ever met.  They started dating Chris’s senior year, and they eventually married in the summer of 2005.

About three years later, Annie and Chris became the happy, grateful parents of Marshall Wyeth, who looks like both of them in true 50/50 equal amounts and makes them both really tired (and really happy) all of the time. Hopefully he’ll like art when he gets older.

Chris and Annie love all sorts of music, old and new art, friends, french-press coffee, falafel, rain and snow, the smell of leaves burning, Chicago and East Aurora, and lots of other very good gifts to mankind.

About Chris
www.chriskoelle.com

After being introduced to the world of printmaking while in college, I fell in love with the medium. Etchings, drypoints, aquatints and monotypes became the primary focus of my work, alongside drawing and painting. My personal work is often figurative and iconic, using symbolism and text layered with decorative elements and realism. At the same time, I am excited by so many different media, stylistic approaches, and processes that I tend to explore making many different kinds of imagery at any given time. Through working as an illustrator and designer, my visual work has broadened into the realms of illustration, print and packaging design, branding, and animation, using digital media alongside traditional—charcoal, ink, pencils and paper littering a desk armed with a Mac, Photoshop, and Wacom tablet.  Generally, my personal work almost always operates within stylized realism, whether dealing with the human figure, antique cameras, bicycles, or botanicals.

I also created the artwork for “Men in Black,” the animated motion graphics segment in the Oscar-nominated PBS documentary Operation Homecoming, directed by Richard E. Robbins, animated by The Law of Few.

Click here for more information on “Men in Black” and to watch the director’s cut video.

Lately my life consists mostly of illustrating a top-secret graphic novel, listening to weird music, smoking my pipe, and of course spending time with Annie and Marshall.

About Annie
www.anniekoelle.com

I think I have always assumed that I would be an artist as a profession, or rather, I never considered doing anything else. As far back as I can remember I have always drawn—on the carpet, on the fireplace hearth, drawing when I should have been doing math, drawing on church bulletins. . . My parents graciously gave me art lessons throughout childhood and high school and then I went on to get a bachelors degree in fine art. One of the best things my art teachers did for me was introduce me to the fabulous artists throughout history—John Sargent, Leonard Baskin, Mauricio Lasansky, and the list goes on.

My artwork is influenced by so many things—those art forefathers I just mentioned, small parts of nature, fashion, poetry, finely made objects and wonderful everyday experiences. I think I have several goals I try to accomplish with each piece of art: to express my personal appreciation for the object shown and to provoke the viewer to appreciation for that object when they come across it again in their own lives. Did I explain that correctly? How about this: be thankful for all the wonderful things you have been given—strawberries, breakfast, cake, birds, lovely brooches, everything. I will be the first to say that I take so many of the mundane things for granted.