Still Life With Fossil Seafood (After The Dutch Masters)

Anna Grayson originally read Geology at the University of St Andrews. It is an observational science and it was the aesthetics of the subject that drew her into it - the natural sculptures of fossils, crystals and landforms. After a great deal of hard graft however, she could not get a decent job as a geologist because of her gender, despite attending interviews dressed as a man...

 

Instead, she spent the bulk of her career working for the BBC, eventually becoming a presenter, mainly of science programmes including several dozen about geology. She won the Glaxo Welcome/ABSW award in 1999 for series of short films about British Geology and was also awarded the RH Worth Prize from the RA’s neighbours in Burlington House, the Geological Society.

 

In 2012, Anna took early retirement, fulfilled a life long secret ambition of going to Art School - Exeter School of Art - and has never looked back. By 2014 her work had been highly commended by the South West Academy and she had her first piece hung in the RA Summer Exhibition where it became partially obscured by red dots. This was her remake of the Arnolfini Portrait, and Anna went on to produce a whole collection of famous works of art re-imagined and updated as photographs.  In 2018 two of her photographs were chosen by Grayson Perry to hang in his famous Yellow Room in the 250th anniversary RA Summer Exhibition. She has exhibited regularly with the South West Academy (and the Artizan Gallery & Words and Pictures in Devon) and has recently had a major solo show in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

During the Covid Pandemic, Anna's work was featured in Grayson Perry's TV series about art on Channel Four.

 

In 2021 Anna had another photograph exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and, as previously, it picked up tens of red dots. Still Life with Fossil Seafood (After the Dutch Masters) was in effect a lifetime in the making. Anna trained as a geologist and during her long career as a broadcaster made dozens of programmes about the science of the Earth. She was the first woman to present a Natural World on BBC2 with a film about the geological history of the British Isles. She won a Glaxo Wellcome award for a series of short films on the same subject as well as the RH Worth prize from the Geological Society of London for her work in public engagement of geoscience and in education. This atmospheric still life brings the two threads of Anna's life together - science and art. She collected the majority of the specimens herself. It is a memento mori for the human race and for the planet. There is only a limited number of prints left in the edition.

 

Recipient of the English Riviera Summer Open Exhibition 2022 // Digital Practice Award

Digital Photograph on Archival Paper

 42x29.7cm

Unframed

Edition of 100