Annie Grimsdale
Soft pastel on paper series
My practice explores portraiture as a way of understanding emotional relationships. This current body of work is grounded in my relationship with my family and extends to a larger portrait that brings these individual connections together. Recently, my work has been shaped by the loss of my dad and Grandad, whose absences have profoundly altered my practice, and provided a new perspective on the way I choose to communicate and navigate grief through my artwork.
Through the medium of drawing, I translate personality, memory, and connection into visual form. Rather than focusing solely on likeness, I am interested in how a portrait can hold the emotional weight of a relationship and communicate how I perceive and experience others over time. Colour, composition, and material process are central to this investigation; I use these elements as a kind of emotional language, shaped by memory, grief, and personal history. Working primarily with soft pastel allows me to build layered surfaces that reflect shifting emotional states, where the act of drawing becomes a process of reflection, as much as one of representation.
Across my work, I am drawn to the tension between closeness and distance in relationships, and how this affects the way we see one another. The work considers how emotional knowledge alters visual interpretation, and how absence can reshape the way memory and connection are held within an image
Through the medium of drawing, I translate personality, memory, and connection into visual form. Rather than focusing solely on likeness, I am interested in how a portrait can hold the emotional weight of a relationship and communicate how I perceive and experience others over time. Colour, composition, and material process are central to this investigation; I use these elements as a kind of emotional language, shaped by memory, grief, and personal history. Working primarily with soft pastel allows me to build layered surfaces that reflect shifting emotional states, where the act of drawing becomes a process of reflection, as much as one of representation.
Across my work, I am drawn to the tension between closeness and distance in relationships, and how this affects the way we see one another. The work considers how emotional knowledge alters visual interpretation, and how absence can reshape the way memory and connection are held within an image