User of the Month: Anna Vanuga, Artist
🌿 anna vanuga
🎨 artist and yoga teacher
⛰️ montana
As a painter and yoga teacher, Anna Vanuga is constantly inspired by the beauty of nature and its seasonal cycles. Read on to learn more about how our November User of the Month uses nature as a lens to shape her art and yoga practice, and how they all interconnect to fuel her creativity.
how did you get into painting and art?
With art, I wasn't raised in a way where my family really encouraged me to go down a non-traditional route. And so while I did art my whole life, I always considered it a hobby. And I was very, very fearful and resistant to making this a full-time thing because I could see it was possible for other people, but I really didn't believe it was possible for me.
But once I started playing with it and testing that boundary, I realized that it wasn't really an option anymore. It was what lit me up. It was what made me the happiest. And I couldn't pretend like I wanted to do anything else but that.
what drew you to the practice of yoga?
After I quit my master's degree — the conventional steps through higher education — and moved into a bus, I was then faced with making the decision of what I actually wanted and trying to figure that all out. I was still really into running at the time. I was doing yoga here and there, but only to take care of my injuries with running.
I moved to Paradise Valley in Montana and was staying in the back room of a friend's house. On my runs, I kept running into bears, mountain lions, a lot of rattlesnakes, and we were so close to Yellowstone that it started to feel a little unnecessarily risky. And I was massively depressed, but not really dealing with my emotional self. For whatever reason, I felt like yoga was the way to deal with it — that I needed to actually physically look at myself, at the things I didn't want to look at.
So I rolled out my mat, but I didn't really know where to begin. And that's when I started using Alo Moves. We'd made enough money that summer to take the winter off, and I was like, "I'm going to practice. I'm going to get on my mat every single day until I start sorting through some of these things." And the more I practiced, the more I started to feel this strong, creative urge not just to move, but to create. And as my practice blossomed, all of this art came out of nowhere, that I didn't even know that I had in me, and in a completely different medium than I had ever worked in before. So the two wove together throughout this winter — lots of yoga, and lots of art, and lots and lots and lots of tears.
what is the connection between art and yoga for you? and how has it shaped your life?
Being in a yoga practice really forced me to learn how to trust myself, how to love myself, and how to let go of that control that I had cultivated with running, where I could track the miles, I could track the elevation. Everything was very military and regimented, and with yoga, it's not. It takes the time that it takes. It's very organic. And you can want your body to do something, but until it's ready, it's not going to.
As I was learning to trust myself more, to love myself more with this physical practice, it was happening at the same time as with painting, where I was having to learn how to just let go of this intense need to control every little detail of the artwork and every little detail of the process and how things were going to look. With watercolors, you lose that control. You have to let go of all control. The paint will decide what it wants to do at the end of the day, which I think is so amazing. It was teaching me over and over again to just let go and trust.
I don't think I would be able to create if I didn't do yoga. Yoga has given me the confidence and the trust in myself to take those risks and put myself out there with artwork. And painting continues to fuel my physical practice — I love the feeling of the fluidity with the paintbrush. I love the feeling of getting into a flow on the mat, where you lose yourself in that moment. They both inspire each other, just in different ways.
What is seasonal living and why does it inspire you?
I became really fascinated with seasonal living probably five or six years ago — this idea of moving through life the same as nature moves through life. What seasonal living is to me means creating variety throughout the year. In my life, my practice actually slows down in the summer and I do a lot more yin and grounding because the heat is so intense and because the days are so long and there's a lot more asked of us in this part of the world. And then going into the winter, I try and create that heat within myself. And so my practice is a lot more intense. And spring and fall are definitely in that transition of what I'm looking to do in the upcoming season and what I'm looking to create for myself.
It’s also right down to the way we consume food and the harvest season, like canning and growing our own produce and creating something that's more sustainable and has more longevity to it. I just think that as humans we've become so disconnected from our natural environments, and that connection back to source, to Mother Nature, it drives me. It fuels all of these things that I'm doing every day.
why is it important to align yourself with nature and its seasonal cycles?
Being surrounded by nature is crucial to my art and practice. I need it. I crave it. It's where I draw all my inspiration and motivation from. The things that I paint are all related to the outdoors. I feel like my strength and power and movement are derived from this place that I live, and these mountains, and the fluctuations of the seasons, and all of it.
I didn't realize how deep the human experience could be until I started practicing yoga. And now that I'm so entrenched in the physical and mental and spiritual practice of yoga, it has made me realize how deeply interconnected everything is — we are just another component of nature. We're like this giant web of beautiful beings. All of us. Animals and insects and people and mountains and rivers and all of it. And it would be be a shame to go through our whole lives and not feel this immense relationship to everything.