Ancient Evenings
by
John Grant
Article featured in Artists and Illustrators Magazine

     There's an old tale about three blindfolded men who're asked to identify an elephant. The first touches the tail and says the mystery object is a rope; the second, grabbing a leg, asserts that the object is a tree; the third, encountering the trunk, declares this is a serpent. The point of the tale is that we're like the blindfolded men; although we can see, we cannot see -- we recognise only a part of what is in front of us, and on the basis of that we constantly misidentify and misunderstand the totality.

     Some people are able to see better than the rest of us. If they're then capable of rendering their vision onto canvas or paper in such a way -- whether abstract, surreal or mimetic -- that we, too, can have at least a glimpse at what they see, then we describe the person as a gifted artist: their works offer windows onto a more profound, more insightful reality than the one we are accustomed to. But the true artistry is, arguably, that initial act of seeing; the technical rendition, while of course extremely important, is secondary.
     The British artist Anne Sudworth is a supreme technician – her evocative, often broody pastel works are superbly rendered and display an almost uncanny mastery of light in all its many manifestations -- but it is the vision inspiring her work that differentiates her from so many other artists who are likewise able technicians. Her pictures have a powerful affect: they pulse with meaning, with the sense that there are many more levels of reality than the superficial one that we normally accept as being all there is. One could think of the world of Anne Sudworth as the world you can only ever see out of the corner of your eye, and which disappears when you turn to look at it face-on.

     She is an artist who rejects labels, even though labels are often applied to her. Certainly she is a fantasy artist, and on occasion she tackles straightforwardly fantasy subjects, as in her brilliant fairy painting Breath of the Bright Fey -- which easily stands comparison with the work of any of the great fairy painters, such as Dadd and Rackham -- or in her teasingly fantasticated landscapes, like the one depicted in Sanctuary. Yet simply to call her a fantasy painter is to call her something less than what she is: to distinguish, she is a painter of fantasy, and I have argued at length elsewhere that, considered as such, she is probably the most important practitioner at work today.

    She has also been described, again with justification, as a mystical painter, a term that unfortunately conjures up notions of the more self-indulgent fringes of New Ageism. There is mysticism a-plenty in her paintings, if by mysticism one means the yearning to penetrate the outside skin of our world to the truth that lies behind, and indeed the philosophical underpinning of her work -- and what makes it so individualistic and affecting -- is mystical; yet you can search a Sudworth picture in vain for meaningless mandalas or any of the other trappings that too often pass for profundity. Hers is a mysticism that is born from the subject matter -- born from earth and air and sea -- rather than from the projection of artificial human thought patterns onto it. It might seem odd to call her a realistic painter, in that the affect of her pictures is utterly different from that of a photograph, yet in a way she is -- with the proviso that the reality she is painting is the reality she sees, not just the surface decor but the underliers. This, of course, is the heart of the mystical vision.

     It is perhaps in her landscapes and in her tree paintings that this is most evident. For example, we've all seen countless paintings of Stonehenge, and some of them have even been quite good, but Sudworth’s vision of this ancient site, in Giants' Dance, is unlike any other. The stones of the megalith are relegated to the bottom most area of the picture; yet, though small and almost indistinguishable in the gloom, they remain a primary focus of the painting. Dominating the area is the night sky, and in particular the crescent moon. One could spend many pages merely describing the cascades of meaning that pour from this picture; here we can merely note the implication that the landscape and its stones are incomplete in isolation -- that they are complete only when taken together with the moon.

     The earth has its magic, the picture seems to be saying, and so have artefacts; but in this instance these are unfinished without the admixture of moon magic. In her extensive series of paintings called Earth Light Trees, Sudworth seems to focus more exclusively on earth magic, and yet in many of them moonlight -- moon magic -- plays an integral part. One of the most mystically affecting of these, The Enchanted Tree, shows this to perfection. The most cursory of glances would suggest that the picture's source of illumination is the moon, but immediately thereafter one realises this is not the case: the main light is coming from the base of this grand oak. This is the Earth Light that gives the series of paintings its name.

   Sudworth explains: "It's a kind of symbolic, sometimes spiritual, sometimes physical light which shows the earth's power – particularly in trees. It's the main theme running through my work, and one that I'm continuing to explore -- the idea that the earth has a darker, lesser known side, perhaps one of which our ancestors were more aware." She adds: "In olden times people would use rhymes and charms to try to make visible the Earth Light of a particularly special place or tree. The Earth Light was said to give great strength and energy as well as promote a more harmonious relationship between man and nature."

     The Earth Light is portrayed even more starkly in Gowrim Idhree. The painting's title is the name of a tree spirit specific to the yew. Yews are taken in legend and folklore to symbolise many things, but one of the most important can be inferred from the yew's alternative popular name, the Death Tree. The Earth Light in this picture displays none of the approachable warmth of that in The Enchanted Tree: instead it is cold, alien, chillingly inhuman. Even if we knew nothing of the yew's connotations, this picture would tell us what they are. The spirit is no cheery little leprechaun.

     Sudworth's intoxicating mixture of fantasy and mysticism – and of something that is more than just a combination of the two – has brought her considerable success. The most recent of several solo exhibitions is the inaugural display during March and early April at the significant new regional museum The World of Glass, in St Helens. And April also sees the publication (by Paper Tiger) of the first book on her work, with commentary by myself - Enchanted World: The Art of Anne Sudworth. A further solo exhibition, at the Grove House Gallery in Keswick, follows in May. Her art is gaining increasing attention in the United States, where she has been the subject of several magazine and website features in the past few months. In short, she has come to be recognised as the major artist she is -- major because of her vision, her ability to see.