A man standing on a ladder painting a landscape on a large outdoor canvas, with trees and a river in the background.

A man wearing a yellow t-shirt and gray pants sitting in front of a colorful, abstract landscape painting with trees and water.

Essay.

Anthony Garratt’s paintings inspire a desire to climb into the landscape he has created. They are about paths, views, vistas that permeate into the distance. They promote emotional journeys into the spaces he has created, the artist stating that ‘they are atmospheres rather than paintings.’ In his ‘Veranda’ series, Garratt creates fictional viewing platforms, ripe for the viewer to metaphorically step onto, to admire the landscape he has created beyond.

His paintings, although presenting a landscape to be accessed, are not comfortable. He relishes the challenging nature of the sublime, finding a beauty in a feeling of jeopardy, reminding us that we are not in control of the landscape.

Garratt finds this vulnerability intensely important in his relation to the natural world. As a keen environmentalist, he wants to remind his viewer of the feeling of the sublime intrinsic to the human experience. He says of the modern world: ‘the sublime is becoming less obvious as life is becoming easier. It isn’t a comfort or feeling of ease, it is a feeling of challenge and motivation’.

Indeed, the moody expanses, the dramatic chiaroscuro, and the saturated colour palette promote a dualism between the ominous and the exciting. His work quickens the heart-rate and fills the viewer with a desire to get out there.
Garratt changes his method and materials depending on the subject matter he is portraying.

In his ‘California’ and ‘Veranda’ series’, he is working spontaneously with spray paint to characterise the slickness of an empty road, the clean divergence between elevated human space and the tumult of the landscape below. ‘It is a cinematic medium’, he explains, ‘spray paint dictates something fast-paced, garish, human-looking’. Although the artist’s initial administration is quick, the last details are applied measuredly with a more analysed application. This allows his paintings to have an air of excitement, of impulsiveness, along
with crisp details of mark-making that draw the viewer through the surface.

His paintings promote a sense of positive isolation within a difficult landscape. The landscapes which inspire him are always deserted, quiet, bleak, sequestered. Garratt sees that true wilderness is becoming scarce in our modern world, so a sense of internal and external quietness within space is what is engendered within his work, as a kind of remedy. His landscapes are specific, often taken from plein-air studies, yet they pertain to a memory of place that is ubiquitous. They generate a feeling of anamnesis: an attachment to a past landscape which he presents to you, beautifully, welcoming you into a place once forgotten.

KATE REEVES EDWARDS, CAPITAL CULTURE

Biog.

Anthony Garratt was born in 1979, He lives in, and works from South Devon . He studied at Chelsea College of Art for a Foundation (Dip), and a BA (hons) at Falmouth College of Art.

He has exhibited extensively in public and commercial galleries, including 20 solo shows to date. His paintings are held in private and corporate collections internationally.

His eclectic, self-initiated public installations have garnered much National press interest. ‘High and Low’ which was commissioned in Snowdonia to communicate the area’s mining heritage, won the ‘Arts and Business Award’ in Wales and featured on National television. ‘To All At Sea’ featured in both The Guardian and The Spectator as a ‘Top Ten Outdoor Artwork ’. His recent public participation artworks have encouraged hundreds of people to engage with the practice of painting, whilst raising thousands for associated charitable causes.

In 2019, following an artist residency with a photographer in South Africa, he established a collaborative project called, ‘Cawston Garratt’, which launched in London and combines, and interrupts, the processes of painting and photography.

Since 2014, he has been a tutor and mentor at The Newlyn School of Art, both on short courses and year-long professional practice programmes. He is a member of the Wilderness Art Collective and runs school workshops to encourage a creative relationship with environmental issues and emotional responses to the landscape.

Please contact for project collaborations or to enquire about purchasing my work.

Statement.

My artistic practice is diverse, but rooted in a passion for our relationship with the concept of ‘landscape’.

My most recent paintings are energetic, plastic and deliberately over-saturated fictions. They have, in part, evolved out of memories from recent travels but are mostly invented spaces that often include empty, modernist structures, sitting within energetic mark making.

Alongside these lively and colourful fictions sit paintings that are quieter, more meditative and organic in their approach. This contrast in style echoes a fascination with the idea of ‘contrast in landscape’ and the global polarity of our experiences in the landscape.

In an essay about my work, Kate Reeves-Edwards writes, ‘Indeed, the moody expanses, the dramatic chiaroscuro, and the saturated colour palette promote a dualism between the ominous and the exciting. His work quickens the heart rate and fills the viewer with a desire to get out there. Garratt changes his method and materials depending on the subject matter he is portraying.’

Much of my studio time is spent excited by the action of painting; finding marks and devices which are practiced and evolved before committing them to a more resolved solution. It is this experimentation that stimulates change in the work.

My ‘other art hat’ is to conceive and produce large scale, self-initiated public artworks. The public installations are led by a particular subject and evolve out of a passion for collaboration and taking messages to an audience who can ‘encounter’ artwork outdoors. These projects not only inspire and alter my studio practice but also enable the opportunity to work across sectors I wouldn’t usually encounter or collaborate with.