The Hill of Dreams: 

Anna Dillon - Oxfordshire landscape artist

Knowing the work before meeting the artist you might expect something completely different from Anna Dillon.  The landscape is alive in her paintings: striations, undulations, furrows, hills curving, receding to the horizon, rendered in vibrant colours with great sureness of touch.  Created by a rather fey hippy with clunky wooden bracelets who will talk about ley lines?

So much for the powers of deduction.

In person of course Anna is nothing like this.  She refers frequently to her background in marketing and it is hard to imagine how someone as unworldly as the imaginary artist could have been as industrious as the real one.

Even so, the prefigured image must connect to something.  The swirling landscapes, painted layer upon layer, oil on board, that Anna Dillon has made her trademark, certainly tap into something romantic, visceral.  The colours stretch into the distance, catching a moment’s light on a hillside.

In September 2012 she exhibited A Ridgeway Journey, a series of 24 oil on board paintings, at the Art @ Goring gallery.  They were worked up from sketches and photographs made during a journey in twelve monthly instalments along the Ridgeway.

Goring is the pivot of the 87-mile Ridgeway.  To the west the ancient droving road stretches out across one Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) to Avebury in Wiltshire; to the north and east through another AONB landscape of wooded hills to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire.

The paintings are recognisable: Bury Down on the Compton Downs, Lowbury Hill, Streatley Warren and Barnes Mill Pond at North Stoke; natural colours diffracted as if through a prism, giving the finished work an abstract quality.  

As the artist explained in her studio, each image is built up from five or six layers of paint.  “There’s a style that I have that seems to capture people’s interest.  I don’t have a name for how I paint, but you could say it’s a bit decorative and stylised.”

Her whole life, bar Falmouth Art College and three years in the Middle East, has been lived around the Ridgeway.  She was born in Wallingford when it was still in Berkshire in 1972, lived in Winterbourne Monkton, a mile from the stone circle at Avebury and was raised in Aston Tirrold, where she now lives and serves as a parish councillor, from the age of seven.

The name comes from Ireland.  Her father Patrick Dillon is a cultural ecologist and has had an appropriately eclectic career.  “He could be in Mongolia studying nomadic lifestyles or he could be here [in England] doing work in Durham University with primary education.”

She is not a fan of conceptual art: “I’m a traditionalist, I like real art” - though she does like Grayson Perry’s ceramics and David Hockney’s recent venture into the country.  As for the suggestion of escapism: “You are escaping, sitting on a hillside.  I don’t have people in my paintings, I don’t think they lend anything to the landscape.  Also, I sometimes remove fences, hedges, sheds, pylons.”

By the time Anna and her husband walked the Ridgeway in 2009 human intrusion had dwindled to one illegal rave, police in attendance.  For the most part walkers are alone with the landscape.

“I’m constantly looking or scanning when I drive or when I walk, clocking the next composition or looking at the light.  Today you’ve got long shadows and quite a dramatic sky.”  The precision comes from her time as an art student in Cornwall.  She studied illustration not fine art “and you can probably see the illustration training in the work because it’s quite detailed and quite fine.”

Anna’s artistic hero is Paul Nash (1889-1946), landscape painter and war artist, known for his views of Wittenham Clumps.  She has co-created the website www.nashclumps.org. 

1st September 2012, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Anna Dillon is lecturing on Nash.  He emerges from photographs, dapper, unsmiling, swept-back hair.  Today is the one hundredth anniversary of the day he came to Sinodun House near Wallingford for a holiday with his uncle.  He could hardly ignore Wittenham Clumps and went on painting and sketching them until the year of his death.

Nash came back again and again to the Clumps - Round Hill and Castle Hill - prehistoric hill forts which loom over Oxfordshire like the Hill of Tara, influenced by Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams.  Has she - had he - “strayed into outland and occult territory”?

“From the eminence of the lane, skirting the brow of the hill, he looked down into deep valleys and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky.”

“As Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were reading a wonderful story, the meaning of which was a little greater than his understanding.”

The lecture turns into a workshop, Anna Dillon encouraging participants to try their hand at a cotton canvas using the nearest brushes and pigments to Nash’s.  She laments the disappearance of his favourite ash blue.

“I don’t feel that I work in any way like him, the connection I’ve got with him is his passion for the landscape and the land around.”  His touch light, feathery, sometimes leaving bare canvas, hers almost impasto.

Anna Dillon takes a businesslike approach to her work.  “As an artist you have to be engaging, confident and you have to now market yourself and my graphic design and marketing background helps.  I can build my own website and produce my own posters.  I sell a lot of prints online.  You’ve got to keep updating regularly.”

Her 2013 exhibition was The Isles of Colour at the O3 Gallery at Oxford Castle: paintings spanning Ireland, Britain, the Hebrides and the Scilly Isles.  The Industrial Henge (Didcot Power Station) wittily alongside The Stone Henge and a particularly striking view of Wittenham Clumps: The Twin Peaks.

Is she ready to go national? 

Having imagined the artist we imagine the critics.  What might Brian Sewell make of Anna  Dillon?  She might bring out his waspish Noël Coward worst.  "The Jack Vettriano of British landscape painters"?  Better than that, surely?

Her latest venture Battlelines Redrawn (www.battlelines-redrawn.co.uk) involves painting the landscapes of the Western Front, particularly around La Boisselle in the Somme battlefield, as  they are now almost a hundred years after the fighting.  As part of this Anna Dillon has been winched down into the tunnels under the battlefield which are still being explored by archaeologists.

The landscape of northern France reminded her of the corresponding downlands in England where she lives.

A delicate J K Rowling beauty, she has found extraordinary variations on a theme.  The landscapes, many seemingly soon doomed to be concreted over, may acquire an elegiac quality in retrospect.

Perhaps the best tribute to the artist is that after a while the real world starts to look like her paintings.

Links:

• Anna Dillon’s website: www.annadillon.com

• Paul Nash and Wittenham Clumps: www.nashclumps.org

• Battlelines Redrawn: www.battlelines-redrawn.co.uk