Anna King: Showcase

Anna King is a Scottish contemporary landscape painter. Her work explores the margins of landscape, the overlooked and peripheral places such as abandoned buildings, wastelands, plantations and quarries. These structures are man-made marks on the world and as time passes without human intervention the paint peels, grass grows through cracks in concrete and the temporary nature of our own existence is brought into sharper focus.

King works in oils on paper, drawing into the wet paint with pencil - the result being a deconstructed, sketch-like finished work. The smooth surface, fragility and fluidity of the mark making on paper echoes the temporary and incidental nature of the places she paints.

The reclamation by nature of marginal or disused pieces of land has long been a theme running through my work, and now my focus is shifting towards details of the vegetation I find there, capturing the random, scattered beauty of these weeds and their surroundings and encouraging an appreciation for the vital role they play in our fragile ecosystems. This series of monotypes has been a key part of that transition. The spontaneous and intuitive nature of this particular technique creates unexpected layers and marks which echo the chaotic and beautiful jumble of plants and grasses that I have spent so much time observing  and drawing.

King was born in Shetland in 1984, graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee in 2005 and now lives and works in the Scottish Borders. King won the inaugural Jolomo Lloyds TSB Landscape Award and the Anna Miller Scholarship in 2007 and exhibits widely throughout the UK.