The Top 100

“In Extremis is a painting about the epic crescendo of a sunset as the day extinguishes and the sky cries colour into the lake. A quenching of the light. The tragedy and beauty in nature, noisy and yet silent. This painting is a very particular memory of a late summer evening out on the lake in Sweden. A night when the sunset at 10.30 pm and the sky fell reflected into the water in a desperate, dripping, blaze. I sat in a small rowing boat on a wide lake, far from shore, surrounded by this colour bath. It was profoundly beautiful and etched in my mind. The colour was saturating and the painting became abstract as the experience.” 

"My paintings take their inspiration from the lakes, forests and skies of a vast Swedish landscape and a very particular Nordic light. This is where they begin like snapshots from a road trip or plotted points on a map. A solitary hunting hide beside a forest road, thistly with dry branches, its spikes like a feathered nest. Solemn snowscapes have long shadows and fierce pink skies. Whole skies reflected in wide lakes and deep, endless, forest.  Hot lupins, dark pines, dripping lakes and quiet fires. The distant echoes of the groaning, warping and thumping of a lake trapped under ice. This is a land where the imagination runs away and the uncanny resides, where the real and imagined co-exist.

 I am enticed by precarious boundaries, where land meets lake and light meets dark. In these unsteady places you are neither at risk nor safe but feel both at once.

 I weave threads of paint onto coloured linens and canvases and make exaggerated, luminous landscapes. I invite an escape into a kind of utopia, where you can smell freedom and pine in the air, a place I think I know. Yet these paintings tell darker tales, I dress them up in the fabric and costume of colour and light." - Ange Mullen-Bryan, 2021

Accolades

Education: Winchester School of Art in 2000.

Solo Exhibtion: Blue shop Cottage, Camberwell, London, 2020.

Prizes and Awards: Shortlisted for the Liverpool John Moores painting prize, 2008. Shortlisted in the National Open Art Prize and took part in the finalist’s exhibition at the Royal College of Art, London, 2015. Selected to hang in the Royal West of England Academy Autumn Open competition in Bristol, 2011 and 2015. 

Showcased by Studio Ashby.

www.angemullenbryan.com
Instagram: @ange_jolene 
Twitter: @Angelajolene