Anna West was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, between Amish country and the coal regions. She took trains to Atlantic City and Philadelphia on her father’s train pass and mingled with nearby Pennsylvania Dutch. After graduating from nursing school and taking photography classes, she left Reading for San Francisco in 1980. While working in photo labs there, she photographed punk bands and eventually played in one herself. Late in 1984, she moved to New York City, the East Village first, then Williamsburg, where she published photographs in Brooklyn newspapers and exhibited in Williamsburg galleries. She started to paint with oils on canvas in 1999. In 2004 she moved to Beacon, New York. She paints daily, and when she travels, she paints on old book covers and scraps of canvas. She painted with food coloring on ice and snow for 21 years, in public places in Malmo, NYC and Russia. In 2015, she love bombed Beacon on Valentine’s Day painting hearts where people asked for one. Anna started collecting old love letters and cards, transforming old love to new for someone else.