Anna Pugh featured at Eden Gallery in Lichfield

The painter Anna Pugh, born 1938, is admired as a colourist and storyteller. In twenty years she has produces over two hundred paintings, all in private collections in Great Britain, Europe and North America. Her paintings, like those of Richard Dadd and Howard Hodgkins, show the commonplace enlivened by touches of the surreal. Few artists equal her ability to record natural phenomena and to invigorate it with such persuasive illusion. They have the freshness and irreverent vitality of life lived close to nature. They are pictures that people enjoy living with, recording the countryside, the flora and fauna and the changing seasons.

In earlier days, when she and her brother were released from their boarding school strait-jackets, they spent hours butterflying, bonfiring and slopping about with jam jars and nets at the edge of the lake. The enjoyable side of their life was spent outside and free. That liberty and enjoyment permeate her paintings.

Each day begins with a walk. The paths she treads take her through woods and fields, across running water and alongside a lake. Each changing season has its own fleeting panoramas. In turn the flourish of spring bluebells give way to summer roses, when the roses fade, autumn’s copper tones glow until frosts glisten under the rising sun. These transient moments invigorate Anna’s pictures.

“The best joy in my garden is when it buzzes with bees and flies and lacewings and beetles; when the marjoram is alive with things crawling, and hopping and flying. I think insects are the stuff of life. I would love to know what invisible things the sparrows are picking up on the brick terrace in the sun.”