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Artist Spotlight
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 froma speeding train, hwere tight tonal nuances and gentle blurrings encourage a realistic interpretation of a view.
Flecks of Naples Yellow in Emerald Lake II sparkle like the lights of a city on the distant horizon; intricate feathered brush strokes in Field II hint at waves of grasses in the foreground with a suffused light overhead . A sense of 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. “
'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'.
Anne now lives and works in the UK and has exhibited in many parts of the world including India, Australia, Great Britain and America. Four Square Fine Arts normally has a few paintings of Anne’s in stock at the gallery and we look forward to her solo exhibition “Across the Divide” to be held between 1st -22nd September 2007.