ANNIE DREW
My inspiration, my passion, comes from nature. This is not a new idea, far from it, however it’s an idea often recoiled in contemporary art in favour of the equivocal. Vincent van Gogh said:
“It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures."
I’m a young artist, just a couple of years out of art school. In fact I dropped out of art school! Whilst there I spent my first year producing some bizarre and unusual pieces. Not what I would call art but I was willing to learn and discover.
We were discouraged from drawing something to look like something. If for example we were drawing a shoe, the less it looked like a shoe the more excited tutors would seem to get, this excitement was intensified if I could wax-lyrical about my artwork. If your shoe didn’t look much like a shoe then you could simply pass it off as a picture ‘about’ a shoe not ‘of’ a shoe! This seemed to negate the need for constructive critisism. If you paint a picture of an owl you put yourself out there for the acid test; does it look like an owl, can I capture millions of years of evolution by evoking the feeling you get observing an owl first hand? A worthy challenge I think.
I was eager to learn some of these skills and techniques required to produce such work. To say I was disappointed, having spent a year at art college and not learnt any such skill, is an understatement. Consequently I left college to teach myself.
I spent a year practicing with different techniques, styles and mediums before I felt my work was marketable. What you see on this site is the result! I’ll let you be the judge.
PLEASE CLICK ONCE ON A THUMBNAIL FOR A LRGER IMAGE
