Anne Soudain

Annie studied at Canterbury Art College and then qualified and worked as an art teacher. Now retired from teaching, Annie works full-time creating lino prints, mostly using the reduction method, wax-resist paintings on silk, and collages.

Annie’s vigorous and colourful reduction lino prints often feature the plants, birds, and landscapes of her local area, the easternmost corner of East Sussex. She uses a variety of techniques, one of her favourites being the reduction method, where the entire design together with all the colours is built up by taking repeated impressions from a single block. She also enjoys wax-resist painting on silk, a medium she finds not unrelated to lino printing. The same method of building colours from light to dark applies, and the cut of the lino-tool and the movement of the tjanting call for the same kind of commitment and ideally convey the same kind of immediacy.

Her interest in plants started in her early years spent in Cornwall, on long walks with her mother, most memorably along disused railway tracks where the cuttings were undisturbed and full of flowers and insects. All her work is very obviously a celebration of nature, and her deep enjoyment and understanding of form and pattern help us to see the natural world more clearly. Much of her work features landscapes from Fairlight, Pett Level, Rye Harbour and Romney Marsh.