Anna Keen’s fascination with the sea leads her to explore the coastal areas of the Isle of Wight and the Thames estuary. She studied fine art in Paris at L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts and has lived and worked as an artist in Rome, Venice, London and Amsterdam. Anna is ‘artist in residence’ at Dimbola Museum & Galleries. Her figurative paintings combine reality with visionary elements. At times she removes traces of modernity to focus on an original heritage site, at others she reconstructs reality by painting lost traces of a real past or imagined traces of a possible future. Art critic Edward Lucie-Smith notes that although Anna Keen’s art seems ‘Realist’, he believed it to be ‘Symbolist’. He writes, “One intuits that there is a subtext, a hidden meaning in the artwork, which despite being a single image frozen in time, gives the unsettling feeling that something is about to happen, or indeed just has.”
Here we see the volunteers installing the exhibition.