By Artist & Ceramics Lecturer, Dr. Terry Davies
The timeless admiration that humankind has displayed towards the creatures of the natural world is manifest in artist Anita Woods’ paintings. She has conjured up entrancing depictions of the wildlife set against the landscape around her home in West Wales. Both she and her husband Richard have always felt drawn to live here, so 25 years ago they moved permanently to Ceredigion. She is adamant that this makes both of them feel comfortable and settled.
Although of Scots and Irish heritage, Anita was brought up in rural Lincolnshire surrounded by livestock, domestic pets and a rich diversity of wildlife. From a very early age both parents encouraged her artistic inclinations and love of nature. Her childhood drawings were full of animal depictions, including those her mother nurtured back to health after being found injured…Anita was a willing helper. Her first “exhibition” was a hedgehog sketch that appeared in the gallery of the television programme Take Hart in the 1970’s. This was sent by her father as he was so impressed with her precocious talent.
As a child she felt a deep affinity with the natural world which has never left her. It is as if she knew nature before she understood it…it was her first teacher. This has unfailingly underwritten her sumptuous artworks, wherein the subject matter is given a dignity extolling the natural world’s beauty and primal energy. Anita, driven by her love and affection for fauna, makes her visions of them powerful and enchanting, and they become deified in her Edenic settings. Our ancient ancestors revered animals for their beauty, strength, and life sustaining properties. In their cave dwellings they appear immortalised in parietal art at Altamira and Lascaux. This gave rise to spirituality, as their images provided assurance in their mutually shared world. From this came the Mother Goddesses of the Old World and the deified lifegiving female. Womenkind’s concept of nature is biocentric, and as Ellen Dissanayake stated, “art has more to do with love and connectedness rather than elitist imposts”. Harmony between humans and animals is expounded in Virgil’s pastoral poems reflecting bucolic tranquillity, also in the Book of Isaiah, the philosophy of Saint Francis of Assisi, and the sensuous grandeur of nature in the work of the Ancients such as Blake, Palmer and Calvert.
The art that illustrates children’s books features animals prominently. These fictional scenes replace the real Edens that children once played in that are now long marooned in the pre- Cartesian world. Many are weaned on sights from the animal kingdom but have them torn away at adulthood. This animal deprivation could be one reason for the popularity of wildlife documentaries…especially amongst urban dwellers wanting to visit Arcadias. Despite an increasingly sullied world, nature’s resistance and restorative powers is evident; and Anita’s art celebrates this healing process.
Anita’s curriculum vitae reveals that she has had over 20 solo and 84 group exhibitions in the last two decades. Her work is collected worldwide, it appears on greeting cards and on small scale reproductions at a wide variety of outlets. Her main body of work is to be found at The Waterfront Gallery in Milford Haven and the Origin Gallery in Carmarthen. She paints in watercolours, gouache and ink, lustres are occasionally used. It takes her 3 to 6 weeks to complete her sizeable paintings. Anita is a founder member of the “Now We Are Nine” exhibiting group, as well as having chaired Celf Canolbarth Cymru for many years. This artist is a member of Origin, a Carmarthen based co-operative, she also ran workshops for Criw Celf exclusively for young artists to experiment and gain experience. In 2021 Anita was elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society of Wales. For a decade she was involved in running painting classes for guests at holiday cottages, Pengwernydd Farm Pontrhydygroes, owned by her friends Margaret and Ivor Hopkins. This proved highly successful and garnered many complimentary reviews.
In her approach to painting there is no pre-planning of the composition as she is guided by evoking stored and subsumed recollections from personal sources. This internal trove is like a vast sketchbook of ideas centred around favoured themes. Aiding this is an innate anatomical knowledge, irrespective of the angle or views of a creature, that comes from her deep understanding and keen observation. Anita begins with a rough outline of her subject and then concentrates on a pivotal starting point, which for her is the eye. The completion of the eye is imperative and makes an immediate connection between artist and subject. After that is completed, the rest is filled in. As some of the animals are nocturnal, a large full moon often appears with a scattering of light like stars creating a mystical depth, as if the cosmos is in accord with the depicted and depicter. For Anita this is a ritualistic event where the artist, in the midst of painting, enters the world of nature to be conjoined with it. In this new dimension a kind of tumescence is triggered during the creative process.
For Anita a world without animals would have a devastating effect as her raison d’etre would vanish. This echoes Welsh artist Eleri Mills’ observation that animals make the land more potent, magical and significant. Environmentalist Father Thomas Berry stated, “our primary need for the various life forms on the planet is psychic rather than a physical need”. However, I believe that physical need is also important as animal assisted therapy has proven to be beneficial. This began in 600 B.C. in Ancient Greece, when it was noticed that the presence of horses lifted the spirits of the seriously ill. The therapeutic effect of horses was mentioned again in the 1600’s in Europe. Florence Nightingale remarked on the positive remedial effect that small pets had on her patients in the 19th century. Sigmund Freud became aware that having his dog present when treating patients was beneficial, as did Dr Boris Leverson later in the 1960’s. Many studies were undertaken, and in 1981 the University of Pennsylvania held a conference centred on this interspecies bond. Nowadays we are familiar with dogs at nursing homes and hospitals and they, and other animals, are involved in current therapy. Anita’s compelling imagery radiates some of this therapeutic element.
Anita believes that there is some kind of atavism at work resulting from a deep link with her Celtic forebears. This could be driven by mnemismus, a word coined by Eugene Beuker to describe the carrying of the history of previous generations in one’s genes. Amongst Anita’s striking depictions are those of the hare which features in Welsh history and folklore. The scourge of the Roman invaders, Buddug, (Boadicea) produced a hare from under her cloak and its darting run was taken as a portent of victory by her assembled army. Around 600 A.D. Melangell, the daughter of a 6th century Irish king, fled to Wales to avoid an arranged marriage as she wished to remain celibate. She settled in the Tanat Valley in North Wales. The tale centres around her being discovered praying in a thicket for the safety of a hare that had sought sanctuary in the sleeve of her gown after Prince Brochfael Ysgythrog’s hounds had chased it there. Despite all efforts the hounds refused to seize it and Brochfael was so moved by this holy woman that he gave her his hunting land, on which no animal was killed in her lifetime. Hares became known locally as Melangell’s lambs, which is the Welsh title of one of Anita’s hare depictions, Oen Melangell. In folklore, the shapeshifting of Gwion Bach into the bard Taliesin saw one of his manifestations being that of a hare.
In the 20th century animal imagery became scarce, replaced by a visual diet of abstraction and the narcissistic self. However, for the last few decades Anita and other female artists have been at the vanguard of a fundamental shift in creativity reminding us of our origins on the earth and our individual inner spiritual life. For centuries such notions had been relegated and marginalised to be labelled as primitive, naive or idiosyncratic, thereafter relegated to the dustbins of superstition. I believe most of us would rather have depictions of nature, such as Anita’s in our homes than someone’s angst ridden scenarios.
Anita honours and values the diversity of all forms of life whilst reaffirming human-kinds’ positive relationship with nature. There is an emotional depth to the work beyond mere representation, essentially she is biophilic, as her work exudes a strong sense of kinship with the inhabitants of the natural world. This gives her art a dimension beyond zoomorphic depictions or a photographic fealty. It is as if some kind of interchange, such as shape shifting, has taken place between artist and subject. Anita has an ability to be enmeshed in nature when engaged in her art making. She celebrates the environmental positive in her paintings, that are mesmeric, exhilarating and life affirming. They have an aura of the ancient truths found in the rich tapestry of the Celtic world that she inhabits physically and cerebrally.
Artworks by Anita Woods: ‘Badger’; ‘HMW’; ‘Lookout’; 'March Madness 1 & 2'; ‘Home before midnight'; 'Moon shadow'
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