Anne Penman Sweet

Anne Penman Sweet originally studied Fine Art at Claremont School of Art in Perth, Australia, and later gained a postgraduate Saint Martins School of Art in London in 1978. She has refined a technique of creating evocative abstract landscapes using a traditional gesso ground which provides a luminous and light-reflective surface for the oil paint. With a restrained palate and assured economy of gesture her work initially gives the impression of transience – a sweeping horizon glanced from a speeding train, where tight tonal nuances and gentle blurrings encourage a realistic interpretation of a view. A sense of both outer place and inner space are captured on canvas.

“Whether in the abstract or landscape-based works, my purpose is to create a kind of tension between, but also resolution and unification of the qualities of stillness and dynamism. The essential or distinctive attribute I'm looking for in the work is contemplative containment, but energised containment, containment that is bristling with possibility, with something as yet unknown. There is no totally anticipated result - the process itself is one of invention, intervention and discovery. The dialectic between structure and randomness or chance is an inherent part of the play of opposites that I'm engaged in. “ Anne Penman Sweet 2007

' The handling of oil paint is evocative, startling and refreshing, challenging the distinctions between the painter’s and the photographer’s art, as well as between abstract and figurative image-making. Her forms suggest other forms, her structures other scales and ways of seeing; her scenes hint at other, yet vaster landscapes, of the world and of the mind.'

Dr. Sue Roe Critic, and Author of
the ‘The Private Lives of the Impressionists’ and ‘Gwen John: A Life'.

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