Sue Anderson, 2017, Doing Laps, swimming, city
Summary
Since the early 1980s, Sue Anderson has been expressing in paint her joy of the world around her. Through a deceptively simple figurative aesthetic, her landscapes depict the central place of a variously constituted landscape in our everyday lives. The high horizon lines and tilted land surfaces of her paintings gently warp any expected perspective, mimicking, to some extent, flattened geological strata. But these layers are not dependent on consecutive temporal eras and the depositing of one layer on top of another; rather, they allow the viewer to grasp simultaneously occurring phenomena in a rich, accommodating and often exuberant landscape.
Anderson's 'Doing Laps' was acquired for the Art and Heritage Collection in 2018, a year after it was made. This brightly coloured and complex landscape knits together urban and rural worlds, the city viewed from across the bay in which the title's implied swimmer does her laps. The stream of traffic through which she moves is perhaps a wry nod to the increasing congestion of our ever-extending conurbation. But the traffic does not stall this swimmer's cheerful advancement.
