ann holt painter

Photographs: artsofar

Ann Holt is a painter, film maker and founding member of Unincorporated, an alliance of women artists. She has exhibited in over 30 group exhibitions, coordinated community arts projects, taught painting, worked in film making and production and arts and music management

In recent years Ann has spent extended periods painting on location in remote areas of Southern Tasmania, on the edge of one of the worlds last true wildernesses. This remoteness and solitude allows her to focus on the rendering of light, mood and palette of the landscape, developing ideas and insights into the language of landscape, the picturesque and cultural identity. Ann's work makes a significant impact on the viewer, through colour, surface and atmospheric environment, reinforced by its large panoramic scale.

In her most recent exhibition, "Thin Blue Line" at Temple Studios in 1999, the works were conceived and installed as a continuous line around the entire gallery space creating the sense of the horizon line, a 360 degree perspective that surround and envelopes the viewer.

Many of Ann's paintings are produced "plein air" utilising techniques based on the "painting tradition". Working on location is intrinsic to the style and method of these paintings. The rendering of light, use of colour and mood are all imbued with the intangible quality of the moment that emanates from the landscape. The approach is not to mimic reality but to connect with the human experience of ritual, myth and memory, stressing the painters direct physical relationship with the process and medium of painting.

For the past eighteen months Holt has spent extensive periods in a studio environment developing "plein air" studies into large scale panoramic works.

"Interaction with nature is a critical element in the consciousness of the world." Artist Statement