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welcome to anne elliott

Anne Elliott’s subject is landscape.  She evokes the physical presence and the emotional experience of extraordinary places by taking landscape into the three-dimensional realm.  Elliott composes by manipulating rice paper that has been painted to suggest rock.  The folds and creases of the painted paper, its projecting shapes, its edges both torn and cut, and the real shadows and highlights that the folds make and reflect – all of these invite the viewer deep into the world created by each painting.  Some of these works are very large, others small, but none of them attempts to illustrate realistically a particular scene in China or any other country.  Instead each one gives you a sense of what it feels like to be there: the sheer presence, the atmosphere, the living existence of the place.  It is really by creating the “feel” of a site that Elliott has managed to achieve and convey her very personal vision of nature.

“We are accustomed to thinking of landscape” says art historian Harvey Stahl about Elliott’s work, “as the province of the painter, of painting alone being capable of the subtlety of light, vastness of form, and vision of nature we expect of the traditional landscape in art.  But in nature we also respond sculpturally, physically; we feel the landscape in terms of surface, mass, scale, and presence.  Although landscapists have frequently succeeded in creating pictorial equivalents for these sculptural effects, some views of nature are simply so powerful and sculpturally rich as to resist conversion into the illusionistic and two-dimensional.  These are the views of nature that Anne Elliott has especially sought out.

* For more information on Elliott’s travels and influences, see “About the Artist.”