Passionate about paint, mark making and colour, Anna Somerville works intuitively imagining expressive, painterly scrapes that conjure up hazy memories of places that she has visited. Layers of thick impasto paint, fine detail glazes, scratched, worked back, scrubbed out and scribbled over canvas, linen and paper, she creates open expanses of space and light in her compositions, allowing the viewer to delve between the layers of paint and reflect on their own memories.
Working predominantly on wooden panels and linen surfaces, she embraces the materiality of each ground, drawing on a painterly sensibility informed as much by the history and language of painting as by what she refers to as 'found paintings' — surfaces weathered over time, revealing accidental painterly compositions.
Her "paintscapes" evoke atmospheric terrains shaped through memory, material exploration, and intuitive process. Horizons loom and recede, suggesting the pull of past, present, and future, opening meditative spaces for reflection.
Somerville is an award-winning graduate from Edinburgh College of Art and her work has been exhibited in many galleries both nationally and internationally. She works from her studio at Summerhall in Edinburgh where she very much enjoys the vibrancy of the building and it’s residents.