Ana Zanella
Calgary, AB Canada
"Layers in art are much like the experiences we gather in life: they shape who we are by adding depth, complexity, and richness to our character!"
Available Artwork
About Me
Ana Zanella is a Calgary-based painter and mixed media artist whose lifelong creative practice is rooted in exploration and intuition. Working primarily with acrylic paint, she embraces experimentation, incorporating inks, watercolours, printmaking, image transfers, drawing, and more into her multi-layered compositions.
Her practice centers on abstraction, with a deep love of colour, pattern, and texture. Her work explores emotion, memory, and lived experience through expressive mark-making and dynamic colour play. Rather than depicting the visible world, her paintings evoke internal landscapes — feelings remembered, moments felt, and stories suggested through colour relationships and rhythmic patterns.
Ana’s work has been featured in several group exhibitions throughout Calgary and online. She believes art is a universal language — a way to express emotion, foster connection, and create spaces where people can discover something of themselves. For Ana, art should serve as a bridge that brings people together through shared experience and imagination.
Examples of My Work
Fun Facts
Color is my super power!!
I love to travel to places where you can pet cats!
I come home from every trip with weird inspirational photos.
I was born and raised on Brazil but Canada is my home!
I love everything about Summer.
More About Me
What is your favorite part of the creative process and why?
The start is always my favourite part of creating.
I’m not afraid of the blank canvas — to me, it’s an invitation to explore, a space filled with possibility.
When I begin a new piece, I work intuitively with paint and a range of materials: charcoal, pencil, markers, and acrylics. I move quickly, adding colour, marks, fragments of writing — without overthinking or judging. I allow instinct to lead.
This stage is about pure play and exploration. Anything can be covered, or transformed as I add new layers, but that happens later in the process.
Which places, people, or moments inspire you the most?
Travelling and experiencing new places is a great source of inspiration for me. I feel incredibly fortunate to have explored many parts of Europe, South America, and North America. Stepping outside of my daily routine and into the unfamiliar sharpens my senses and shifts my perspective, in art as well as in life.
Experiencing different cultures, customs, languages, along with landscapes that range from urban centres to coastlines and historic architecture feeds my visual memory. I am drawn to the colours of markets, the textures of old walls, the layering of posters, tiles, graffiti, fabrics, and the quiet poetry found in everyday street scenes. These impressions do not always appear in my work in a literal way, but they settle into my subconscious and resurface through colour palettes, patterns, and gestural marks.
Travel disrupts habit. It invites curiosity. It teaches me to observe more carefully and to embrace contrast between old and new, stillness and movement, chaos and harmony. In my studio, these experiences transform into abstract compositions that carry traces of places and feeling rather than direct representation.
Being immersed in visually diverse environments reminds me that creativity is universal. It reinforces my belief that art connects us across language, geography, and experience, through shared emotions and memories.