Happy Days

Limited Edition Print by Annie Smits Sandano

Silk Screen Print on hand painted background

Dimensions: 825 x 625 x 35mm

Silk Screen Prints: Annie Smits Sandano is known for her vibrant, handcrafted silkscreen prints that blend bold graphic forms with a playful contemporary folkloric sensibility. Her Lobster and Daisy series, produced during her printing residency at Sonsoles Studio in London, reflects a distinctive balance between organic originally hand rendered subject matter and highly stylised flat colour background composition.

Created using traditional silkscreen techniques, the works in this series emphasise detailed crisp outlines screen printed over the top of and carefully layered acrylic inks and spray paint. The lobster—often associated with the sea, resilience, and delicacy—is juxtaposed with the daisy, a symbol of simplicity and natural beauty. This pairing creates a subtle tension between strength and fragility, rendered with a lightness that keeps the imagery accessible and decorative without losing conceptual depth.

The London context is important: the city’s dynamic printmaking scene and rich history of graphic arts inform Sandano’s approach, particularly in her embrace of repeatable imagery and bold visual language. Each print in the series carries slight variations inherent to the hand-pulled silkscreen process as well as unique painted backgrounds, reinforcing the tactile, artisanal quality of the work. The spray paints used in the colour backgrounds are also a nod to the graffiti seen all over London and its ubiquitous presence in the cityscape.

Overall, the Lobster and Daisy series captures Sandano’s ability to transform everyday motifs into striking visual statements—celebrating colour, craft, and the enduring appeal of hand printed traditions.

Artist Bio: Annie Sandano celebrates the cultures of her birthplace, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and her current home, New Zealand. She merges cultural factors from Brazil and New Zealand; assembling, collating and hybridizing to reconfigure our traditional visual vocabulary. Sandano’s prints create a narrative of contemporary folklore with references to modern illustration, traditional Japanese woodcut prints and the respective histories of decorative and fine arts in Brazil and New Zealand.

Annie is primarily interested in investigating the basic interaction between line and colour via materiality and/or process. A visceral response is often her end point. Her visual cues are broad: from painting to ceramics to printmaking, everything interests her. She seeks to create images and objects which operate on a visceral level and incite an emotion which transports the viewer. Colour, light, texture & shapes are all key concerns throughout her practice. A lot of the satisfaction in making comes from working with materials & her work is process-driven.

Within each of the disciplines in her practice Annie often strives to cultivate processes which at first instance are rooted in the traditional - primarily analogue and championing labour some and, when relevant, antiquated methods. At the same time a lot of my work blurs the edges of where one medium begins and the other ends, questioning both and this way creating space for the visual dialogue to be questioned within a contemporary context both aesthetically and materially.

Her limited edition prints are hand made using traditional analogue techniques and her ceramic works are all very tactile and slowly hand-built. Annie’s original paintings are often built from materials she has created or using techniques she has hybridised from printmaking.

Annie is interested in continually developing a diverse portfolio of works and approaches, working solo and collaboratively and exhibiting her work in an array of platforms. Having completed her Fine Arts education at Elam School of Fine Arts with Honours and the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in the USA, Sandano has had successful exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

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