Anne Cécile de Bruyne
There is a long white line along the horizon as you look out from Anne de Bruyne¹s cliff top house. It is where the English Channel meets the Atlantic. Here the two seas merge and converge into a seam of molten spume - and here on the Cornish cliff top is where this most painterly painter works.
Anne¹s house is covered in her past glories . And not just hers. The paintings round the walls of the cool low 60s beach style house are done by her whole family. In one room reclines an exquisite 1920s nude in a Chelsea studio by a greatuncle, a friend of Singer Sargent. On another wall a brilliant landscape by her grandmother alongside an interior by her aunt.
But most striking of all are Anne-Cecile¹s past paintings. She points to a breathtakingly accomplished interior saying ‘That's in my early style'. It is stunningly complex , brilliantly executed, Vermeer would cheerfully have
owned up to it. And in other parts of the house are earlier paintings demonstrating awesome command of the medium, closeups of vegetation you would swear were graphic photographs, paintings done with such precision you can pinpoint a blade of grass. A flat in Paris where the sun pours in through a caged window is captivatingly real. .
We walk across the now obliterated cliffedge chamomile tennis court to the old garage of the original 1900 Simla-recreation hillstation. The old house had burned down, like Manderley, as Anne sat at her easel in Art School. Her studio is the only building the flames didn¹t reach.
When she opens the door, the large room testifies to a tough grafter. Her recent
paintings stack the walls. But what is really arresting is the change of style.
Sequences of paintings have now morphed into abstract. It is as if the energy of the
oceanscape has somehow boiled and distilled into blurs of colour, melted into shapeless incandescence. Which is a tricky business in Cornwall. In every gift shop is a presentation of pictures in the abstract style. Everyone in the county who can wield a brush seems to have dipped it into a combination of blue yellow and green and snapped ‘There you go!' as they hoist the same set of colourways onto a hundred gallery walls . But here are seascapes so divinely executed, where feeling and technique merge so masterfully. Her very latest work has refined into a meditative misty blur, broken only by a brutal fissure in the paint, a dark anxious crack in the
surface running vertically through the troubled landscape. Recent international events have reduced me to just pouring the paint onto the canvas and letting it run
down like tears' she says. But these are artfully shed tears with the power to move
others. These sequences of mourning in greys and whites have a quiet assertion about them, so do her deeply thoughtful abstract coloured paintings. Anne-Cecile believes the artist cannot help making herself known to the viewer even when she is trying to be as objective as a reporter.
What I knew whilst looking at these complex accomplished paintings , was
that I was in the presence of a considerable, an important, artist.
Anne Garvey from an unpublished article about three artists, for The Times newspaper 2005
photo by Marea Downey EDUCATION
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Lycee Francais de Londres
Universita per Stranieri, Florence
Cambridge Art School
Chelsea Art School |
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2000-2001
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2005
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Artbank, Clerkenwell, London
Bishop Phillpotts Gallery, Truro
Bishop Phillpotts Gallery, Truro
Bishop Phillpotts Gallery, Truro
Yew Tree Gallery, Morvah
Broughton House Gallery, Cambridge
Falmouth Art Centre, Falmouth with Silverwell Creative |
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