My drawings are a response to nature.
They begin without a plan. Wandering, I look for places that I feel I can read.
Poet Seamus Heaney said that the landscape is sacramental, to be read as a text. “Earth is instinct: perfect, irrational, semiotic.”
The terrains I chose are places where change is evidence of past events and present actions, visually dynamic locations that present potential danger. The threats can be violent torrents of water, landslides, ravines of granite boulders, a black abyss of swirling water, the face of a mountain or water cascading thousands of feet. I sit in front of enormity and draw. Sometimes I am aware of feeling scared, sometimes excited; always, in my body, there is a sensation and a desire to respond. Perhaps here my dulled, overly stimulated senses are revived. Here beside the ancient, revelations rise and a quiet knowing grows slowly, like the diamond that is created by earth’s pressure over millions of years. I carry away a sense of human vulnerability, scale, and mortality and a small swallow of insight regarding the complex, changing symbiosis between humanity and the earth.
Today the earth, as a subject in art, is relevant, urgent and timely. It is a gesture of change and hope.
Anne Scheid – 2009