Art - Second Glances

Ann Johnson paints in what she admits to be a ‘Naive’ style, in the manner of Roy Oxlade or Gary Goodman. “My main interest is with colour,” she says. “I start with a subject, but that is just a vehicle for me to play with shape and colour. So while my art is representational, it is a very personal representation of what I see: I like to alter perspective, and simplify objects.” “I think a lot about this,” she continues, “because I’m asked a lot about it. There’s a child-like quality to it, but it’s not the child in me. I actually can ‘draw’ - I studied life drawing for donkey’s years - but I started to find that in struggling to get things too exact, you start to lose what it really means. Landscapes are a good case in point. How can you expect to copy nature?”

Anne’s paintings are displayed alongside Pam Hughes’ poems, some of which are inspired by the frames they sit next to. “We’d been working together on poem cards, and Pam spontaneously started writing poems based on my paintings. Or at least using them as a starting point. I feel the two mediums go well together. They are very similar, really. In both painting and poetry you are trying to be succinct, to construct something out of rhythm, and to fit an idea into a small space.” The exhibition, hung in the beautiful Crypt Gallery, is entitled ‘Second Glances’. AG