Meet Anya Gonzales

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Anya Gonzales. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Anya, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?

For me, creativity isn’t something I force. It’s a spirit I protect. A quiet pulse that needs beauty, rest, ritual, and room to breathe.

As an immigrant woman, I was taught how to survive. To excel. To make my family proud. But survival doesn’t leave much space for softness. And for a long time, I thought my art had to take a backseat to being “practical.”

It wasn’t until I started painting again that I realized creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s a lifeline. It reconnects me to the Caribbean, to the parts of myself I had pushed aside. The light in my work, the softness, the warmth, the intimacy, it all reflects the kind of world I long for. A world where rest doesn’t have to be earned. A world where beauty is allowed to linger.

To keep my creativity alive, I build a rhythm around it. I light candles. I open the windows. And paint with tender music in the background. I slow down, even when the world tells me to speed up. I’ve learned that my art can’t grow in urgency. It needs slowness. It needs care.

That’s part of why I created The Print Club. It’s a monthly, slow-mail art release that helps me stay rooted in creation, and helps others reconnect to themselves through art that feels like exhale. Every month, I release a small, museum-quality print designed to evoke memory, softness, or stillness. Some pieces celebrate rest. Others hold tenderness. Many are inspired by the textures of the islands or the quiet strength of women at ease.

But more than anything, The Print Club [https://anyacherriceart.com/pages/the-print-club] is a container. It holds me accountable to creating from devotion, not pressure. It protects my creativity from being swallowed by algorithms or burnout. And it invites others into a slower, more intentional relationship with art, where a print isn’t just a thing to hang, but also a moment to feel.

There are still days I feel blocked. Days when I wonder if this path makes sense. But what keeps me going are the messages I receive from people who hang my prints in their homes and tell me, “This brings me peace.” Or “This reminds me of home.” That’s what it’s about. That’s one of the reasons why I paint.

So how do I keep my creativity alive? I listen to it. I honor it. I don’t treat it like a machine. And through ritual, rest, and the spaces I’ve created like The Print Club, I’ve made a home for it—one that lets me create not just from ambition, but also from love.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m Anya Cherrice, a Trinidadian-born artist based in Pasadena, California. I paint soft, emotional pieces rooted in memory, identity, and rest — and I turn those paintings into museum-quality prints that bring beauty and stillness into people’s everyday spaces.

The heart of my work is The Print Club [https://anyacherriceart.com/pages/the-print-club] — a slow-mail art subscription that delivers one 5 x7″, exclusive print to collectors each month. Each piece is printed on museum-quality, archival paper and carefully packaged, with the intention that receiving it feels like opening a quiet moment just for yourself. The prints celebrate softness, warmth, and the kind of beauty you feel in your chest — women at ease, tropical stillness, golden light, moments of solitude, and the textured landscapes of island memory.

I started The Print Club as a way to reclaim rhythm and ritual in my art practice, and to create a space where others could collect meaningful work without needing a gallery or a design degree. It’s become a way to connect across borders — with people who understand that beauty is not frivolous, it’s essential. Especially for those of us who were raised to hustle, perform, or stay small.

What excites me most right now is deepening that global connection — reaching people in every corner of the world who are craving softness, storytelling, and art that invites them home to themselves.

Outside of The Print Club, I’m currently exhibiting in Pasadena Museum of History’s 100 Years – 100 Images, a juried group exhibition honoring a century of visual storytelling in Pasadena. It’s an honor to have my work included in this historic reflection — especially as a Caribbean artist shaping a future rooted in color, care, and cultural memory.

My work is bright & colorful — in the best way. Bold, lush colors. Saturated pinks, golds, greens. Layers of movement, light, and warmth. It commands attention visually, but it holds emotional softness at its core. Whether you discover it online or unwrap it from an envelope each month, I hope it makes you pause. I hope it makes you feel something. And I hope it reminds you that you deserve softness, too.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Looking back on my journey as an artist, the things that moved the needle the most weren’t skills I picked up in a course or tips I read in a marketing book. What truly shaped me were deeper qualities I had to grow over time: intuition, self-trust, and creative resilience. They weren’t flashy, and they didn’t always make me feel powerful in the moment, but they were everything. They still are.

Intuition was the first one I had to learn how to listen to again. As an immigrant woman, you get so used to tuning your instincts out. You learn to be practical, to be efficient, to survive. But intuition is quiet. It doesn’t shout. It pulls. And for a long time, I ignored that pull. I said yes to things that didn’t feel aligned. I questioned the parts of me that wanted beauty, stillness, softness. But eventually, I got tired of pretending. I started listening again. That’s how The Print Club [https://anyacherriceart.com/pages/the-print-club] was born, from the whisper that told me I could build something slower, more intentional, and deeply mine. Something that didn’t need to be loud in words, because the colors and the vision would speak for themselves.

Still, even once I followed that pull, I had to learn how to trust myself. That was harder. I’d been conditioned to wait for permission, whether that was from a gallery or from a gatekeeper who would validate me as “legit.” And when you grow up in a system where you’re rarely centered, it’s easy to doubt that your version of art, your way of doing things, is enough. But building a business as an artist means betting on yourself daily. It means creating and releasing even when no one’s clapping yet. When I launched The Print Club, I didn’t have all the answers. I didn’t know how many people would subscribe or if it would work long-term. But I believed in the vision. I believed in the feeling it gave me, and the feeling it could give others. And that was enough to start.

That’s where creative resilience comes in. Because even when you follow your intuition and trust yourself, things don’t always go smoothly. There are slow months. There’s rejection. There’s comparison. There are moments when you wonder if it’s all working. And in those moments, you need a kind of quiet grit, not the hustle-hard kind, but the steady devotion kind. The kind that shows up even when it’s not glamorous. The kind that knows your art still matters, even when the algorithm is quiet or the sales are low. I’ve had to build that muscle. I’m still building it.

If you’re at the beginning of your journey, my advice is this: listen to your gut, even when it whispers. Don’t wait to feel ready — start from where you are. And don’t measure your worth by the pace of your growth. Measure it by your alignment, your joy, and the honesty of what you’re creating. Your creative voice is alive. It will grow if you protect it. And your path is allowed to look different. In fact, it should.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

The most impactful thing my parents did for me was give me permission to dream bigger than they could fully understand — and the steady support to keep going even when I wanted to quit.

They didn’t always get it right. They didn’t always understand the scale of my ambition or why I wanted what I wanted. But they tried. And they created a home where it was safe to want more. That was everything.

Let me tell you a story that explains what I mean.

I was sixteen and completely overwhelmed. I had just started at a new school when one of the teachers, out of the blue, asked me to enter a speech competition. I only had a week to prepare, and the pressure felt unbearable. I remember crying in my room, spiraling with the feeling that I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t know how to pull something that polished together in that little time. I wanted to quit.

But my mother didn’t flinch. She stayed calm and said, “You can do this.” Then she brought out this tiny silver digital camera — the kind with the flip-out screen — and we started recording. She had me deliver my speech, and then we watched it together. She gave feedback, I revised it, and we’d record again. We repeated that process over and over until I found my voice. Her belief in me was relentless. Honestly, it was a little annoying at the time, but I needed it. I ended up placing second in that competition and got invited to a youth leadership conference that helped shape how I saw myself. I even wrote my college essay about that experience.

It didn’t magically change my life, but it helped set me on the path I’m on now. That moment gave me confidence. It taught me that even when something feels impossibly hard or unfamiliar, you can figure it out. You can create a path to what you want, even if you don’t see one in front of you yet.

My dad supported me in quieter but equally powerful ways. He drove me to that speech competition. He picked me up and dropped me off from school every day. He carried my book bag and lunch kit out of the car without being asked. He drove me to every piano lesson, ballet recital, after-school session. Through those small daily acts, he showed me that I never had to carry it all alone. That I could dream big and still lean on someone.

Together, my parents gave me the freedom to stretch and the safety to come back home. They didn’t always understand the full scope of what I wanted or why. But they nurtured the parts of me that dared to want more — and they never let me give up on myself.

And I try to take that same resilience into my art. The same belief that something soft and uncertain is still worth showing up for. That you can keep practicing, keep adjusting, keep returning to your paints and paper until it finally feels like yours. I paint with that spirit now. Not from perfection, but from persistence. Because someone, once, handed me a camera and said, “Let’s try again.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.anyacherriceart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anyacherrice_art/
• Other: The Print Club – my slow-mail art subscription, rooted in Caribbean beauty and rest, that delivers one 5 x 7″, exclusive print to collectors each month.

  https://anyacherriceart.com/pages/the-print-club

Image Credits

Savannah Greenly