Before Diving
Holly Anderson
- Sitter: Holly Anderson
- Medium: Oil on Board
- Dimensions: 20 x 26cm
- Representation: This artist represents themselves
- Categories: Female Artist
About the artwork and sitter
This small self portrait is all about Brisbane’s summer light. Having grown up here, Holly Anderson is deeply familiar with the intensity of the city’s light. For the past few years, she has observed this light’s strange and flattening effects in her paintings “and its characteristic white hot burn across the skin.”
Called ‘Before diving’ this self portrait is an interaction between Anderson’s body and this familiar Queensland sunlight. “The artist shelters from the midday sun beneath her hands, the wiggling grid of the pool playing across their face. The hot white light appearing blindingly between jostling squares of paint.”
Holly Anderson describes her work this way: “I work with painting to investigate sensory experiences with light and landscape, in continual reference to the bathers and sunlit subjects of romantic Australian landscape painting. Various ways sunlight might accentuate the limits of perception or describe a strange permeability of the lit world are tentatively explored.”
About the artist
Holly Anderson completed a BA in Fine Art with Honours at QCA in 2017, where she now teaches in the painting department. She has exhibited across Australia and been a finalist in the Clayton Utz Award, the JADA prize and the Redland Art Award. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Brisbane.
