About Anita
Painting and photography and working outside - forest/heathland fires, sand quarrying, dry heathland, glimpses of familiar land seen whilst driving. All subjects that are compelling: soil disturbance, smoke, dust, charred, cut and harvested, patterned by heavy machinery often industrial or agricultural - early memories of local forest fires are still very much alive.
Currently and for the last 6 years a vast stretch of largely grain harvesting monoculture in Southern UK becomes a widely patterned undulating carpet created by always dusty combine harvesters, balers and tractors which create the grain harvest in late August. This is the place I keep returning to regardless of season.
My usual practise evolves from an emotional trigger taking me back to favourite locations repeatedly with obsessive hours spent on frequent visits over a long period of time, usually many years.
My paintings surfaces have a grounded, textural quality which can be of unexpected outcome with scattering and pouring as if arrived at by chance.
“ Anita Gellatly lives on the borders of Sussex, Hampshire and Surrey, in a landscape of downs and heathland that seems on the face of it almost too easy to enjoy - too lush, too beautiful, too densely inhabited by other people’s visions and expectations. But having grown up in this part of the world, Gellatly gives us a rawer, more primal vision of this quintessentially English landscape. Hers is a world that has been ravaged - but beautifully - by man: the charred vestiges of heathland fires, vast sand quarries eroded into near-lunar formations, the draggings and scourings of industrial forestry and farming.
But as with all the best landscape artists, what and where Gellatly paints is less important than what she has to say about it. She shows us her world of hot, intense colour, in layers of atmosphere that contrast with the textures and markings of the burnt and worked gritty earth. It is a vision that feels at first exotic, but which emanates organically from her experience of this formative landscape.”
Mark Hudson - Art critic of The Independent, freelance journalist and Author of ‘Titian, The Last Days’