Meet the Artist: Anna Weckerle

Anna Weckerle didn't set out to become a painter. She set out to get off her laptop.

That's the honest version. The slightly longer version starts in Munich, detours through a Hamburg design degree, a Milan masters, an ad agency she couldn't stand, and a design studio job she loved — before landing, eventually, on a beach in Ericeira with a set of oil pastels she'd bought on a whim.

This month, she's showing that work publicly for the first time.

The long way round

Anna studied Communication Design in Hamburg, specialising in multimedia and advertising. A stint at an agency taught her fast what she didn't want: "They kept on giving me these brand books, and then like, design all the ads and campaigns and stuff — I was like, I want to do the brand book. I don't want to do the design for the campaign."

So she went looking for something more specific and found it in Milan — a masters in visual brand design, followed by three years at a design studio whose main client was Pirelli HangarBicocca, a contemporary art museum. It was, by her own account, a genuinely good job. A boss she loved. Books for exhibitions where she got to decide everything — format, paper, the whole object.

And then, slowly, Milan wore her down. Not the work. The noise. "Even if you just drive a little bit, everyone's honking the entire time — I was like, why? There's no reason." She could have pushed her Italian from fluent-adjacent to fluent. She decided she didn't want to.

She freelanced for a while — including a full rebrand of a B2B cosmetics company, work that came easily given she'd trained as a makeup artist herself, years earlier, almost as a side note. She moved to Amsterdam. Then COVID sent her back to Hamburg, close to family. And then she found herself asking the question a lot of Outsite members ask themselves eventually: what am I actually doing here?

How it started: an Instagram ad and a breakup

Anna found Outsite through an Instagram ad in 2021 — one she'd apparently been served for years without acting on, back when she was in a relationship with someone who had no interest in that kind of life. "He was remote, but there was no real desire — he just wanted to work from home."

When the relationship ended, the timing lined itself up. Her first stop was Lisbon, four people in the house, still COVID-cautious, everything quiet. She'd booked two weeks. She extended almost immediately once she heard about Ericeira — booking six weeks there for the summer without having set foot in it.

Six weeks became five months.

"I had the most epic summer. I still have a lot of friends from that time — we talk about it often."

Where the painting actually starts

The turning point was almost incidental. Anna picked up a small set of oil pastels while still in Lisbon, then carried them to Ericeira and started painting on the rocks by the ocean, mostly to have something to do with her hands that wasn't a screen.

"I spent so much time just watching the ocean. I'd take my little kit and paint sitting on the rocks."

She didn't think much of the results. They went in a drawer. Someone eventually asked to see them, she hung a few on the wall — and the cleaners at the Centro house told her, unprompted, that they were genuinely good. She hadn't believed it herself until then. "That made me think — maybe people do like it, and who am I to judge?"

What followed is one of those stories that could only really happen inside a coliving house: an impromptu gallery night in Room 10, everyone texted to come see the walls covered in her work.

Chasing the Atlantic

From there, the map gets bigger, and so does the work. In Norway — Lofoten, first in the near-permanent dusk of February, later through a two-month stretch of midnight sun she found strangely draining — Anna started a new series painted on aluminium, chasing the specific flatness of fjord water reflecting the sky. It's an unpredictable process by design: she rolls paint onto the metal without knowing exactly which colours will land where, then waits to see what emerges. "I don't usually sit down with a perfect vision and then execute it — I want it to lead me." For a self-described perfectionist, she says, the not-knowing is the point.

Morocco came next — Outsite Marrakesh, then a road trip toward the desert where her driver, after five days together, told her she'd love Dakhla. A ski accident with her mother — a ruptured knee, two months unable to walk, a cancelled trip to Egypt — delayed the plan, but didn't kill it. She healed at Outsite Marrakesh instead, physiotherapy arranged twice a week by the night manager, Otman. Her first steps back were taken there.

Dakhla, when she finally reached it, felt different immediately. "The minute I arrived, I felt so at peace, so grounded." She built a kind of second family there around Farid, a local artist who works in carved plaster and wood, and his Swiss business partner — eventually getting her own apartment in town, and a standing table in Farid's studio.

Colour as a throughline

Ask Anna to describe her time in each place and she'll answer in colour before anything else. Ericeira is a specific, slightly grey-blue — "where the sky melts into the ocean." Marrakesh is orange, worn head to toe for a while, tied to what she calls a "deep sensuality." Dakhla is muted — sand in the air, hazy sunsets, everything beige — but with an intensity underneath that she says runs deeper than Marrakesh's, just quieter about it.

The materials have followed the same instinct. In the Atlas Mountains, she started collecting red earth pigments and grinding them into paint. In Dakhla, she works in shell collage — sourced from restaurant oysters rather than the beach, on principle. "If I made a business out of collecting shells myself, it wouldn't feel right. This way, it's something they've already used."

The first real show

Anna has staged plenty of these — Room 10, Farid's guest house, a friend's salon in Dakhla with a wall-sized shell piece. But this is the first time her work is going up as an official exhibition, at Outsite Ericeira — the place where she picked up a pastel for the first time and, without really planning to, became a painter.

Gallery Night : Made in Ericeira is on September 24th, at Outsite Ericeira - Boavista. 

RSVP here.