My name is Anael Zaia Hester and visual art is my vocation. Even in lapses of faith, when I think it better to give up and go a safer route, I always circle back around to it. After graduating from Baltimore School for the Arts in 2020, then going off to study art history in university, I decided after my freshman year that I would much rather be making art then writing about someone else’s. So, I am currently taking my skills to the next level by studying traditional academic realism at the Swedish Academy of Realist Art (SARA). It is one of very few schools around the world that teach drawing and painting methods passed down from the French ateliers of the 18th/19th centuries. Also, fun fact: its educational lineage can be traced back to master Leonardo Da Vinci!

In a world crumbling beneath its own warped priorities—function over form, efficiency above passion, work before play—my key takeaway from learning these methods is that beauty is essential. This is the basis of Nu-Aestheticism, a philosophy I devised in order to label a currently-unfolding artistic movement focused on welcoming back old creative practices as opposed to lambasting them, and doing so in opposition to a society that serves only to embolden the rise of threats to cultural sustainability like staunch individualism and AI “art”. Nu-Aestheticism poses a pertinent question that Aesthetcism failed to ask: what happens when society attempts to take art away from us? It is my long-term goal to nurture and promote this ongoing renaissance with my artwork and writing.

For now, though, I create art for the purpose of learning all I can about creating it in a manner resembling the Old Masters, and seek to immortalize the beauty of that which surrounds me in a unique act of love for it.