Ana Young isn’t interested in pictorially representing scenes. Her paintings channel the moment of entering a space, the moment of slowing down and settling into stillness and silence, where awareness of light, volume, and spatial relationships grow. Shapes advance and recede, drawing the viewer further into the painting’s depths. The canvas expands and contracts, breathing with us despite existing within the finite confines of a stretcher.

Ana deeply immerses herself in natural landscapes which allows her to study the relationship between time, memory and silence through her art practice. Having lived all over the world, Ana has found the continual changes of nature to be the most inspiring subjects. She records and studies the landscape, then returns to her North Sydney studio to explore the possibilities of these captured moments through painting. Through considered brushwork and colour palettes, Ana revisits a singular moment of natural phenomena whether it be rain, or light through trees and the transient change of night to day.

Says Ana of her practice, “Paintings are a process of addition and attrition, they grow skins, I want to remember the singular reaction to the land, entering the silence and contemplative nature of being in the landscape. The work changes as memory and the physical processes in the studio allow for an independent rhythm and arrival point, both separate and allusive to information gathered from constant observation.”