Anne Sudworth is arguably the most significant painter of fantasy
at work today.
That statement requires immediate justification, of course, since
you will search in vain to find her name in most of the fantasy art
reference sources. The reason for this apparent oversight is simple
enough: such sources are concerned almost exclusively with fantasy
(and more usually science fiction) illustrators, even though they
may tip their cap to such figures of fantastic art's history as
M.C. Escher, Richard Dadd, Salvador Dalí and René
Magritte. The task of an illustrator is a specialist one: it is
to produce an illustration a piece of art that is pendant to
a specific work and designed to promote the work and, significantly,
look good in print. It is a byproduct of modern technology not
to mention modern economics that almost all of our best and most
imaginative fantasy artists are currently working in the field
of illustration.
It is, therefore, easy to forget that there are other fantasy
artists, artists who work outside this particular field whose
area of operations has unfortunately to be described using the
unfortunate term Fine Art (unfortunate because its `fine' suggests
superiority). A number of fantasy illustrators produce Fine Art
in addition to their more commercial work one thinks of, for
example, the excellent abstracts and semiabstracts of Ron Walotsky
and some, like Bob Eggleton and John Harris, create paintings
that can be illustration and Fine Art at the same time; the doyen
of such artists was of course the late Richard Powers. But more
pertinent to the current argument are those who, while their works
may on occasion be used as book or CD cover illustrations, essentially
do not illustrate: they are Fine Artists, pure and simple. They
march to their own drummer, with no need to observe the diktats
of commercial illustration. They may in some instances go largely
overlooked by genre enthusiasts, but the quirky quasiSurrealistic
paintings of Judith Clute, the obsessive 3D constructs of H.R.
Giger and the painted Amazon parrot feathers of Theresa Mather
are as much fantasy art as anything by Frank Frazetta or Michael
Whelan.
Elsewhere the illustrator Ron Tiner and I have argued that the
essence of fantasy art seems to be that it is a narrative form.
This, it should be noted, is a description rather than a prescription
we were observing, not ordaining and it applies as much to Fine
Art as to illustration. What we were commenting upon was the fact
that, perhaps uniquely among the thematic classifications of the
creative arts, there is little discontinuity in the expression
of fantasy across the whole spectrum of that genre, whether the
conduit be the written word, the cinema screen, the painted canvas,
the poem, the song or whatever other means the creator finds. 
All are dependent to a greater or lesser degree on the notion
of story, and in the case of the painted fantasy picture this
most commonly means that there is a kinetic at work: although
the artist displays what seems to be a simple thing, a single
motionless scene, there is nevertheless a sense that it has both
a before and an after. Perhaps the most overt example of this
in [Enchanted World: The Art of Anne Sudworth] is offered by The Arch (See left; please click on the title or thumbnail image of the art for a larger, more detailed, view.): although on the face of it this is a straightforward
`view', in fact it is full of the sense of motion, the profound
expression of story, in that you the central character in this
particular story, as in almost all the best stories are fully
aware as you look at the archway of the fact that you have approached
or encountered it somewhere amid strange country, and that shortly,
it is inevitable, you will go through it to the lands beyond.
There is a further trick the artist of the fantastic can perform,
although it is one that is very rarely successfully done. This
is to create an image, whether it be illustration or Fine Art,
to which one's only possible response on looking at it is that
this is not so much a fantasy picture as a picture of fantasy.
One such is Ron Walotsky's Fantasies (1991), done as an interior
illustration for Amazing Stories; another is Judith Clute's astonishing
Footpads of Darwin #1 (1994). And there are a few a very few artists who perform this particular feat not just now and then
but virtually all of the time. René Magritte very self-consciously
and deliberately did so; who could look at his Le Château
de Pyrénées/Het Kasteel in de Pyreneën (1959)
showing a castle and the rock upon which it stands floating above
a choppy sea without the feeling that they were looking directly
into fantasy's soul? Like Magritte, but without his self-consciousness
in that the images she paints are superficially mimetic rather
than surrealistic, Anne Sudworth creates picture after picture
that shows fantasy naked.
There is a further considerable difference between Magritte's
and Sudworth's paintings of fantasy. Magritte does most of the
work for you; Sudworth doesn't. Magritte's alternate reality is
very ostentatiously fantasticated, so that your own imaginative
contribution to the viewing experience, to the generation of the
kinetic fantasy that makes viewing Magritte's paintings so exhilarating,
is a comparatively minor part of the equation. Sudworth's landscape
of the mind, however, is not nearly so overtly skewed from normality
at a quick glance many of her paintings can look almost photographic
so that the viewer's contribution to the fantasy dynamic is drawn
from much deeper, is more profound, is more a product of factors
other than the intellectual than in the case of Magritte. To take
a single example, even were The Fairy Wood not so titled, it would require an exceptional literal-mindedness on the part of the viewer not to be emotionally affected by the
feyness the `fairyness' of the painting, not to discern the
fairies present in every stroke of the brush, in every gentle
cadence of the light. (See left; please click on the title or thumbnail image of the art for a larger, more detailed, view.)
These are the reasons why I say that to repeat my words exactly
so there can be no confusion Anne Sudworth is arguably the most
significant painter of fantasy at work today.
It is a statement by which I stand.
Further information:
The Official Anne Sudworth Site (includes galleries of her work)
Paper Tiger
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