Painting POETRY

Ignoring textbooks and making up her own rules has garnered landscape painter MARY ANNE AYTOUNELLIS many fans, including Prince Charles, as REBECCA BRADBURY finds out Poetry

- REBECCA BRADBURY

From being whisked away on a private jet to draw a buffalo jump in the foothills of Canada’s Saskatchewan Mountains to meeting indigenous Amerindians while painting waterfalls in the Guyanese rainforest, Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis had some extraordinary experiences in the noughties as an official tour artist for HRH The Prince of Wales. Today, the royal heir continues to collect Mary Anne’s work, but the artist is much more likely to be found back home in Lewes, tramping across the rolling hills of England’s South Downs with a five-foot-square board balanced on her head.

Scratched by thistles and licked by the rough tongues of cattle, her supports are plunged into perilous positions, but this is all part of the process. “It’s a hell of a lot to carry and I nearly take off if it’s windy,” Mary Anne admits. “But I need to just sit there, really early in the morning, and just draw. It gives the work an atmosphere and power it wouldn’t have if I just relied on easy ways of doing it.”

For over a decade now, the landscape has been at the heart of Mary Anne’s output, renowned for its richly detailed, intricate layers and atmosphere so evocative it can cause goosebumps. It’s a body of work that not only relies on her hawk’s eye for observation but also her vivid imagination and memory. This is especially true of the paintings completed over the past five years, which are to go on show in The Woods I Know, her postponed exhibition at London’s Portland Gallery this summer.