Anne Garton has been involved in creative endeavors most of her life. She studied illustration at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in the mid 60’s where she was exposed to the famous Group of Seven landscape painters of the 30’s and 40’s. Their influence on her work is evident today, especially in her choice of the post-impressionist landscape as her subject. After moving to the Boston area she studied painting in Scituate, Massachusetts under the marine artist, Michael Keane and the still life artist, Roz Farbush. Later partnered with two other women in the The Bare Cove Gallery in Hingham, Massachusetts. In 1980, she was instrumental in developing Business Impressions, one of the first art consultancies in New England. Later she entered the field of advertising where she worked for twenty-five years, including a stint at WGBH in children’s television production. In 2001 Anne moved to Eastham on Cape Cod full time. For several years she consulted as a free-lance producer and writer. Inspired by the inexhaustible natural beauty of the outercape, she returned to painting in 2006, studying with the painter Rick Fleury and subsequently with the New York landscape painter, Marjorie Portnow, and the abstract artist Sue Miller at the Fine Art Work Center. Her early Canadian influences still dominate her artistic sensibility, as she strives to distill her love of her natural environment into a profound and spiritual artistic expression. Anne has exhibited in numerous juried shows, including the prestigious Northeast Show at the Cambridge Art Association, juried by Nicholas Baum, chief Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Winter Juried Show at the Duxbury Art Association and several members’ juried shows at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Cape Cod Art Association.
I am a Canadian-born painter who has lived and worked on Cape Cod for several decades. My work is in the tonalist, or luminist tradition, which aims to create mood and sensuality through a poetic, even brooding, rendering of the natural world. My paintings reflect both the influence of these long-established American traditions as well as the powerful effect of my northern artistic roots. My approach to the landscape is to place myself on the edge of a viewing platform or, in some instances, to fly over it, or perhaps to view it through a murky glass. My goal is to create a tension between the intuitive observer and the painted landscape, so that the viewer participates in the silent and empty space of each work of art. I paint the sky because it dominates the Cape landscape and because it tells us almost everything there is to know about our moment in time. The sky gives us the personality of the day. It is an ever-shifting marker of mood and temperament, and it is always looming, shadowing, spilling into the sea and over the landscape. Humans are irrelevant to the sky, to all of nature, and it is that irrelevance that I try to capture in my work. We take our emotional signals, our sight-lines, from the oblivious sky. We drift outside at night to study its implacability, its moods and revelations. We step out into the morning, our eyes trained to the declarations of the sky, our first daily impression. Here on Cape Cod, the sea and the sky create a kind of dance. In Eastham, as if on an island, the artist moves easily from the shifting tidal flats of the bayside to the windswept outer reaches of the ocean; from sunrise over the sea to sunset over the bay. I am attempting, like so many artists, to capture the sublimity of Cape Cod with my simple tools of paint and canvas. I have always been drawn to the emotional, even the sentimental, quality in art, both past and present. In my own work, I strive to create an environment where the viewer has placement and participation, can imagine himself or herself as being “there,” located inside the world I create and its emotional context. It is as if the viewer has come home, in a sense --- has escaped into some other imagined place.
Anne Garton is represented on Cape Cod by Susan R Danton of Miller White Fine Arts
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708 Route 134, Dennis, MA 02660
Tel: 508-360-4302
In the Boston area, she is represented by Renjeau Galleries
79 Worcester St., Natick, MA 01760
Tel: 508-655-5121. Email: Info@Renjeau.Com