Anne Meggitt, “Sombrio Rhythms,” 2014
oil on canvas, 36” x 48”
More than anything, Anne Meggitt’s paintings, with all their leafy canopies, sun-dappled wildflowers and tangled underbrush, are about seeing. Her hand is subtle and loose: she places the right mark in the right place, the colours precise though generally within a limited tonal range that keeps the eye in motion, restless and scanning. “I only need to do each thing once,” she says. “I try immediately to have it exactly right.”
Her paintings, at Victoria’s Martin Batchelor Gallery until Sept. 28, are largely forest views on Vancouver Island. Her scenes feel familiar. It’s easy to think you saw that small fir next to a favourite camping spot, or perhaps those six dead trees, their skeletal trunks gleaming through the brush, along a trail you’ve hiked. These are the humble spots passed on the way to the grand view, trees and bushes scanned quickly, like faces in a crowd, never consciously committed to memory, yet somehow there nevertheless.
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Anne Meggitt, "Forest Sentinels" 2014
oil on canvas, "40 x 50"
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Anne Meggitt, "Swept Away," 2015
oil on canvas, 36" x 48"
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Anne Meggitt, “McKenzie Bight Canopy,” 2016
oil on canvas, 48” x 50"
Meggitt calls herself a “compulsive mixer” and her delicious greens, carefully blended from multiple colours, evoke the rich possibilities of foliage. Those with an aching hint of ochre drift to late summer, while the acid of a leaf gleaming in a beam of sunlight seems too sharp until you step back and it pops into place, resolving with the rest of the canvas.
With few hard edges, Meggitt's work suggests light and density, layering and depth, even the time of day, essentially mapping how she understands place. She paints indoors, not from photographs, although she uses them as references, but mainly from sketches and memory.
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Anne Meggitt, "Impenetrable," 2015
oil on canvas, 30" x 40"
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Anne Meggitt, “Woodland Discovery,” 2014
oil on canvas, 40” x 50"
It’s surprising, then, that Meggitt only turned her attention to West Coast woodlands four years ago, when she moved to Victoria from Regina to be closer to her two daughters. Remarkable too is her age – she was born in 1930, but is still painting prolifically in a tiny studio at her daughter’s condominium.
Meggitt credits her love of nature to her childhood in an English country house. She attended art school in Britain, then lived in Africa with her husband, a surveyor who gathered information to make maps. She moved to Regina in 1977, and studied with the late Ted Godwin at the University of Regina.
Her love of painting is palpable. It is, one senses, what creates meaning – and joy – in her life. Her philosophy is profound in its simplicity. “I’ve decided in life the thing that matters is to be happy,” she says. “There is not much that is more important.”