ANNE BYRNE -  SKY ARTS Landscape Artist of the Year Semi-Finalist talks to Andrew Liddle

One of Chester’s most picturesque sights, the iconic Queen's Park Suspension Bridge crossing the Dee, is captured in perhaps Anne Byrne’s most locally popular painting – her evocative homage to the city.

There is something about the subdued serenity of the mood created in the blue still  water reflecting the slightly hazy sky, the pathway dissolving into pale sunshine, that is instantly appealing.  It’s a timeless scene virtually unchanged from the early 1850s when the bridge was built.

A companion piece uses the same gentle colour harmonies and fluidity to portray a very different scene but with the same lyricism, the newly-restored Albert Dock in Liverpool, the city where she was born. The converted warehouses are seen across blue shining water. Both paintings somehow allow us to share a moment of private reverie.

Anne is about to become famous, raising her profile no end when selected out of  thousands of entries to appear in the SKY ARTS  2023 Landscape  Artist of the Year contest competition.  “I’m anticipating the programme will generate a fair bit of interest from galleries and art buyers,” she says, choosing her words carefully.

“It was a great honour, right out of the blue.” She still sounds quite surprised. “I’d always contemplated applying but somehow the timing had never been quite right.” Emboldened by her work being picked up by galleries and a growing number of buyers she decided to throw her hat into the ring.  To be chosen by the team of experts as one of the 8 “pod” artists, given their own booth as a temporary outdoor studio, was great news.

Filming took place in Blackpool on one blustery day in June June and she was sworn to secrecy about the result but her sunny smile is nothing if not optimistic. The task was to put on canvas the fairground’s famous roller-coaster. “Mechanical  structures have never been my subject matter,” she says forthrightly, and the pods were directly facing the enormous roller-coaster flat on. But to me Blackpool is more than that. Yes, the place is synonymous with a fairground tradition of providing entertainment for generations of holiday-goers since Victoria times, but it is also a place with vast expanses of sea and sky". With this in mind and with careful composition playing a key part in Anne’s creative process, she took the decision to capture a view that presented more than the huge roller-coaster in her painting.”

Her style would no doubt be called ‘Expressionistis’ in the art colleges in St Helens and Preston where she studied in the late-1970s. “I aim to create a piece that brings something more to the visual experience of simply looking at a landscape,” she begins to explain. “I try to present a reality as I consider it to be, with focuses on aspects that may not ordinarily be immediately evident by being simply ‘there’- showing something more fundamental to the viewer."revealing something deeper.”

She firmly believes the high tension of the occasion and the presence of an enormous film crew to say nothing of scores of interested bystanders, stimulated her adrenalin, got her through the long day. Although the actual process of painting is limited to four hours, the filming takes much longer, with the artists breaking off for interviews and to allow close-ups of their work in progress.

“It was a roller-coaster day,” she smiles, “not for the faint-hearted, but and rewarding.” 

Anne  always wanted to paint but confesses to having “lost focus and failed to find her way on the Fine Arts degree course she began - eventually quitting to get a after leaving college and getting a “proper job” . Her first job in a graphics studio led to a full and varied career in Marketing.  She also found time to study Psychology and eventually became a marketing consultant.  Moving on from the world of marketing and communications, she has developed a profile as a well respected artist with commissions under her belt. Oils are her ‘go to’ media but she can work across multi media also.and following  “I love the texture of oil paint, its buttery consistency, their fluidity and range.

Her practice has developed and is now firmly established. “The wheel had turned full circle and finally the art student had become the full-time artist.”