Bleak and beautiful
Anna King’s love of ‘forgotten places and wastelands’ offers a view of Scotland that may be off the beaten track, but is no less captivating
As a landscape artist living in the Scottish Borders, Anna King’s interpretation of Scotland is not what you might expect. Sidestepping views of lush rolling hills and pretty rural idylls, instead she brings light and space to barren ‘ wildernesses’, where nature and the man-made collide.
‘I was born in Shetland and although we moved away when I was four, I do like to think that some of the openness and blank expanses on this island have influenced my work.’
‘I really enjoy doing paintings of industrial, scrubby wastelands and things like lorry containers. There are so many idyllic paintings of mountains and crofts, but I’m not interested in these sorts of scenes. I like showing the other side of Scotland.
‘I was up in the Highlands recently and I ended up taking a whole load of pictures of pylons, which were jutting through the landscape. I like creating a contrast to what you expect Scotland’s landscape to look like, and showing the actual, more industrial, reality to some of it.’
While coming from a family with an ‘arty streak’, it was only when King went to high school that she decided she wanted to go to art college.
‘Art was my favourite subject at school, but I wouldn’t say it was something that I’d wanted to do since I was small, it came more gradually.
‘I moved to Dundee to study at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. That was my one and only experience of living in a city and I got quite interested in finding barren, open spaces there – wildness in the city as it were. I tend to paint a lot of places that others just pass by and rarely notice.
‘Often I’ll be somewhere and see something that would make a good subject and I’ll go back and take photographs. At the moment I’ve been painting quite a lot of places round the Borders. I now live in Innerleithen in the Tweed Valley, where I’ve been for about two years, and I’m becoming quite interested in painting a lot of the forestry plantations that are around. Although there are lots of trees and greenery, it’s still really quite industrial, so you get massive expanses of clear felled trees, which are really interesting to paint.’
King’s current studio is about a 25-minute drive from her home in the grounds of The Haining, a country house and estate in Selkirk in the Borders, managed by The Haining Heritable Trust, which has converted a block of coach houses and stables into art studios.
‘The majority of the paintings I do are of Scotland, but that’s really because that’s the place that I’ve spent the most time. I did a bit of travelling in eastern Germany a few years ago, mainly because there are so many dilapidated buildings there, and I’ve painted a fair bit of England as well.
‘I would like to do some more travelling – Iceland in particular is a place I’d like to go – but I’d imagine I will always be based in Scotland.
Anna is currently showing work at Wall Projects in Montrose and is holding an open weekend at her studio in Selkirk on 6 and 7 June. www.anna-king.com
Anna King in her studio at The Haining, Selkirk, where she is holding an open weekend on 6 and 7 June.