London the Metamorphosis

Description

As London evolves into a Babylonian-style city of lofty towers, the artist Anna Keen has been inspired to paint this London Metamorphosis. While each new edifice heads to the heavens, the exposed entrails of these vast construction sites strangely resemble ruins. Her large canvases are enriched with details stemming from patient observation and on-the-spot sketches, and from voyages around the city made by helicopter, boat, road and on foot. Like the eighteenth-century artist J.M Gandy, who simultaneously painted London in ruins and in construction, Anna Keen takes us just beneath the surface of the metropolis, to where the emotional landscape lurks and to where the soul of London is heading. London-based art historian Edward Lucie-Smith has followed Anna Keen's painting since 1995 in Rome.

Anna Keen is a British artist, born on the isle of Wight in 1968 and brought up on the remote Scottish island of Arran. She studied six years at the art school in Paris L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, where she obtained her diploma with distinctions. She has lived and worked as an artist in cities such as Rome, Venice, London and Amsterdam, where she has had over ten solo shows, participated in seventy collective shows, won several prizes and is represented in important private collections. Anna Keen has now returned to the UK and is currently painting the Babylonian-type London skyline, which mutates constantly. Edward Lucie-Smith is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writers on art. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world.