Annabel Wilson: creative artist

Annabel has loved creating and making things since before she can remember. Drawing, painting, knitting, and sewing, whatever has taken her fancy. She has learnt and developed the appropriate skills to enable her to produce beautiful and well crafted paintings, products and designs.

In the early days it was painting and drawing, then an introduction to pottery and textiles at school. At home she taught herself to sew and create clothes. Later she decided to study 3 D design at Birmingham School of Art and Design. She specialised in Interior Design, via a brief investigation of silversmithing and landscape architecture. She completed her degree, followed by many years practising commercial interior design in London for many well known names. Marks and Spencer, Woolwich Building Society, Ladbroke Hotels and Harvester Inns are a few of the clients she worked for.

She moved into illustration and then painting and printmaking full time on settling here in Dorset in 1999. A few steps later and she was knitting and then dyeing and printing textiles.

She has been helped and inspired by Julia Cameron and her book The Artists Way, Karin Werner at the Findhorn Foundation, the paintings of Samuel Palmer, Chen Chi Kwan, Richard Diebenkorn and Paul Nash and the traditional textiles of Nigeria, Ghana and Japan

“Working from drawings done in sketchbooks, she keeps her designs simple using single ferns or perhaps an ochre dandelion head studded with tiny star-shaped mother of pearl buttons. Long-stemmed hogweed and teasels snake down folds of linen and calico, whilst deep pink fire-lilies on cotton-voile whisper in the breeze wafting through her studio door.

Although a painter, Wilson originally trained as a designer, and now she has moved sideways from painting in search of a new approach she finds that she can combine the elements of craft and fine art in a way that is quite unique.”
© Fiona Robinson 2007