Anne, your work often depicts expressive and energetic landscapes. How much and in what way do the sights and sounds of your environment (eg, the beautiful British Columbia, where you're based) influence your work?

There is a wildness to the landscapes here in British Columbia that defies the relentless pace and intensity of modern life. Once I am immersed into the wild places that are such an integral part of my life here I often feel as if time has stopped and all of the noise of daily life has simply fallen away. I am left with the quiet of the woods, until I turn my attention to the flora and fauna around me, then I am suddenly overwhelmed by the energy and sounds of nature.

These experiences then follow me to the studio where I work from memory in a very intuitive fashion. My approach is an attempt to channel the voice of nature onto the canvas; to translate the beauty and rich diversity of natural life here, and inspire others to take notice and appreciate the value of it.

Your work is at the same time abstract, impressionistic, landscape, modernist. What is the significance for you of defying easy categorisation?

That is a question that has been made by several curators to me in the past, and it is not really an intentional path that I have followed. I am greatly inspired by those periods of art, and the approaches to art-making that define that work, but I don’t feel that trying to reign myself into one specific category will help my growth as an artist.

For me, the work in the studio happens in a very responsive way to the events and stimulus that surround my life. I try to make each studio session a learning opportunity and strive to be as authentic and honest as I can be in my work.

The outcome of each painting is a genuine surprise to me. I think that happens because I put trust in the process of painting honestly. When I do that, the story of each work comes through in a unique way.

You lean heavily into the use of rich colour. What does colour mean to you, and do you find yourself drawn to any particular colours that seem to weave through your work again and again?

Colour has always been a starting point with my work both as an art director and an artist, and it is the most critical driver of my painting practice. It can be used to communicate emotion, create an environment, and is a fabulous tool to create an evocative visual language within a painting.

I am constantly inspired by colour and unusual combinations that I come across in my travels and day to day life. These are collected and stored in my memory to be recalled for inspiration when I am needing a place to begin a new piece.

For me working with pigments is the ‘craft’ component of painting. I love the alchemy of colour-mixing and arranging them throughout the composition. I don’t consciously choose a palette or a selection of colours before I begin a painting, nor do I ever use a pre-mixed colour straight from the tube, so I suppose you could say that tertiary colours are my primary repetitive choices. And I definitely don’t have favourites as I like to create new ones constantly.

I usually begin each painting by mixing a singular colour intuitively and then approach the canvas with a calligraphic flourish. This forms the foundations or structures within the surface that inspire my next steps. As I progress with the work, so do the colour choices and arrangements.

How do you approach titling your work - is there a specific story or feeling behind each piece?

The titles typically come to me near the end of the painting process on any given piece. As I let the painting’s subject, composition and palette unfold on its own, so does the name. A story seems to appear, or a memory that comes through the image as it is resolved. I simply give the work a good honest look and search for something that triggers a word or title that just seems to fit. Very rarely will I have a series of paintings that share a common visual approach, but in those cases when they do, they will either share a name or relate to one another in some literary fashion.