"In my work I chase after the energy, connectivity and language of nature, rather than the landscape as a place. The more I search to understand it the more complex and beautiful I find it to be."
- Anne Griffiths
Anne Griffiths Solo Show MAAT Gallery - July 2026 JUST BEYOND
This solo exhibition at MAAT Gallery entitled Just Beyond, is named for where my work actually lives; a half-step outside the visible world and on the edge of memory, of perception, in the spaces between things. I have always painted from this precarious threshold where, beyond the first impression of a forest or shoreline lie other levels, quieter and less obvious. Not a physical place, landscape or vista as you would find it; but what remains once I have looked away. I have lived on the west coast of Canada all my life. Mostly in Vancouver where the coastal mountains gather the weather with its distinctive blue-green light, and for the past decade, in Victoria on Vancouver Island, with its rocky shoreline, warmer hues and brighter days.
While this nature is so familiar, abundant and accessible, I have never intended to record it through my paintings. Rather, I walk in it, sit in it, let it accumulate — the shifting colour of the sky, a dark stand of fir trees, the particular quiet of a place you have known for years. It settles slowly, coming back to me later in the studio, already half a memory. I begin every painting with colour, a single tone, mixed sometimes for half an hour until it's exactly right.
After that there's no plan: I build the canvas by feel, in oil and oil stick, working the line back into the wet paint so it carries the speed and energy of these places just beyond our grasp. It is a gestural, abstract way of working — though never abstraction for its own sake; the line is always following something I have known. These are the small, in-between places I keep returning to — whole worlds in themselves, quiet enough to sit in for a while.
The recent bodies of work, with this show the palette has darkened and the paintings have moved into lower light; dusk, and the dark, the hour when a forest stops being a view in front of you and becomes something you feel your way through. Water returns again and again, holding a second, looser version of the world just beneath its surface. The titles keep to that edge — Night Path, Late Night Dip, Moon Tides — the places where what's visible is just out of reach.
In my work I chase after the energy, connectivity and language of nature, rather than the landscape as a place. The more I search to understand it the more complex and beautiful I find it to be.
- Anne Griffiths June 12th, 2026 - Victoria, British Columbia
