Profile
Ann Blockley is a watercolour and mixed-media artist with an individual style developed over a lifetime of professional painting. Her pictures are evocative, atmospheric and intuitive capturing an elusive air of mystery and magic within Nature that lies tantalisingly between reality and the imagined. She is continually exploring, experimenting and re-evaluating her work and is becoming increasingly interested in more natural, alternative ways to create art.
Her artistic practice embraces a range of materials and techniques chosen to express the unique interpretations of nature that are her signature themes. Ann has made several films and has written numerous books on her painting methods.
Ann’s work is collected extensively across the globe and she writes for British and international art magazines. She is a member of both the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour (RI) and the Society of Women artists (SWA), who both hold their annual exhibitions at The Mall Galleries in London. She is also a member of The Arborealists, a diverse group of artists who value trees, forests and a connection with nature, exhibiting in venues and galleries around UK and France. Ann’s late father was the inspirational artist, John Blockley RI PPPS RWA.
Ann has recently moved to South West Devon to have a new adventure, restoring an old house and large, wild-wooded garden and land where she hopes to continue connecting with nature and sharing her ideas through painting.
Artist's Statement
When I was seven I lived under a rhododendron bush in The Wood. It was my Gaudi palace with its complex architecture of intricately woven branches, twisting, carved columns studded with the ruby reds of sumptuous flowers. It was my secret haven where I could stand on a throne of logs to recite the poems in my head and make drawings. The rooks were my companions and a mossy carpet embroidered with the stars of fallen blossom was my playground.
Years later I visit a different wood on daily walks. I watch a new generation of rooks gather and swoop and listen to their cacophony of sound as the sun lowers itself into the tangled black lace of the treetops. I am no longer a princess but I imagine myself to be an artist and I collect leaves and acorns, thoughts and words and feel my way into the moods and seasons of nature. I imagine I am a creature scrambling through earthy tunnels under the brambled hedgerow, weaving my way around gnarled roots and burrows. I imagine I am a bird, perching in that hedge with its skeins and creeping ribbons of berries. I watch the light pierce through gaps in the labyrinth of marks and shimmer in the ponds where I see the entangled trees and undergrowth reflected.
I take these thoughts back to my studio. Here I can remain connected with the poetic, precious organic world of the woodland, hedge and field. I let the paint flow and mingle, using marks in ways that evoke and suggest something of nature’s words and imagery. The challenge is to convey a mood and create an air of mystery or magic. The aim is to subtly alter reality into something more elusive. I enjoy playing with marks that are intriguing in themselves and sometimes merely allude to the facts. However, I am influenced by the way that the wanderings and happenings of paint often echo nature itself.