Anna Teasdale solos at Victoria Art Gallery

Written by Annabelle Sowards Saturday, 30 October 2010 22:42

Bath, UK - A new exhibition of paintings by local noted artist Anna Teasdale portraying our ‘Promised Land’ is at Bath & North East Somerset’s Victoria Art Gallery through 24 February. This glorious celebration of landscape captures scenes in Mull, Devon and Wales, before returning to the hills and valleys around Bath. Anna has exhibited in Bristol, Liverpool, London, Italy and  Switzerland and has been a Member of the Bath Society of Artists since 2004.

Anna grew up in a small village near Rye on the edge of Romney Marsh on the East Sussex/Kent border.  The first pictures she saw were reproductions of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings pinned to the walls in her village school.  ‘The Hireling Shepherd’, ‘The Blind Girl’, ‘Ophelia’ and ‘The Death of Chatterton’ were favourites.  
 
The first artist she was aware of was the watercolourist Edward Burra who lived in the same village. They had a mere ‘nodding’ acquaintance, as they passed daily, Anna on her way to school and the shy, reclusive Burra shuffling off to buy cigarettes.  She saw his work in the Penguin Modern Painting series.  His paintings and the works of the Pre-Raphaelites drew directly upon the familiar landscape of Sussex and Kent, so Anna was made aware of the landscape she knew being translated into painting.  Like many children, Anna began painting at a young age – but she just carried on into adulthood.
 
Anna’s experience of growing up in the country in the war years and after was very different from life as it is today.   Now it seems a tamed and comfortable dormitory - land for larger towns.  Then many families, like Anna’s, were very poor.  Children worked with their parents in the fields at haymaking, harvesting, hop picking, thistle spading and potato lifting.  They had a very special relationship with the soil; they worked, walked and played in it.   No one had a car, a bicycle perhaps if you were lucky.  Anna developed a deep love for the country with all its scorching sun, wild winds, rain and mud.  It became her promised land – comforting and inspiring.
 
She later studied fine art at St Martin’s School of Art  in London where she met and married the artist Robyn Denny, from whom she is now divorced.  She has a son and daughter, now grown up, and has lived and taught in Bath for many years.
 
Anna says of her painting: “My paintings are more narrative than representational, that is, they are about subject rather than of the subject. The places or objects that I paint have seemed to make a direct appeal to me to do something with them – to first absorb and then interpret them.
 
Growing up on the edge of Romney Marsh gave me a strong affinity with landscape, now my main preoccupation, although I think I see every potential subject as a landscape – heads, bodies and objects included.  They are all places to be explored, the contour lines to be charted and elevations worked out.  So the final work is an invitation to stroll about within the parameters of the picture.”

The exhibition continues at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bridge Street, Bath until 24 February. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm, Sunday 1.30pm to 5pm. The Gallery is closed on Monday. Admission is free.

For more information about the Victoria Art Gallery log on to www.victoriagal.org.uk

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