Excerpt:
...Anne Grgich is essentially a self-taught artist.
She has filled countless notebooks with poetry and sketches
or 'doodles' since her childhood. These books have a
long and circuitous evolution into her present, fabulously
dense collage paintings and painted books. Grgich works
on canvas and still fills books but instead of a pen,
she uses a brush, pens, crayons, wax and whatever else
comes her way. The poetic words have disappeared. In
their place, Grgich paints sharply peculiar yet forcefully
compelling human faces. Her images have a pure visionary
nature.
Grgich's life has been more traumatic than most. At
age nineteen, she suffered from a serious car accident
that placed her in a coma for two months and has consequently
caused her pain and surgery ever since. After the accident
she became mixed up in a mind-controlling cult. She
escaped but joined a punk-rock subculture involved with
drugs, and married an addict. When she found herself
pregnant, Grgich pulled herself together, left drugs
and an abusive marriage behind and gave birth to her
son Jasper. Despite all the suffering, troubles and
confusion, Grgich never stopped making art. She said,
it's what gets her through.