ANNA DIBBLE
“These paintings were made in April 2026 at Camont, an artist residency in the Garonne River valley, Southwestern France. Every day I sat on a rusty iron chair in a a wild garden next to a canal that runs from Toulouse to Bordeaux. Paper on a piece of wood in my lap.
Soundtrack: songs of European wren, robin, magpie, and now and then a barking dog. View: Gnarly, vine clumped acacia trees, flowering shrubs, fence stakes, scruffy grasses, saplings, blue sky. Materials/tools: watercolor and acrylic paints, one battered brush my father painted landscape with fifty years ago, and a collection of sticks I found on the ground.
I am primarily a studio artist painting as intuitively as possible from imagination and visual memory. This work was an experiment in observational painting. I think of it as ‘indirect observation’ because I am not trying to act like a camera with a hand and brush, capturing the more obvious version of the view in front of me. Instead, I aim to see with, perhaps, an inner eye. To look at the branches, leaves, sky areas and other elements in a way that is more like viewing them in peripheral vision or the shapes they make in the space they live in. That, at least, is the approach. The rest involves trust in my experience at this moment in time, and ditching doubt and fear. This way of working, both inside the studio and outside, has become habitual and intense in the past two year: A new training of my vision and hand abilities from a more facile way of working into a more difficult, but more rewarding one.” – Anna Dibble on new work