Anne Appleby

Who is Anne Appleby?

Anne Appleby is an American color field/landscape painter. Her works, always bearing titles from the natural world---"Sweet Pine", "Summer Aspen", "Gem"---are simple arrangements of colored canvas panels. Each panel is, at a glance, monochromatic, but closer inspection reveals deep and luminous gradations of hue.

She received her B.F.A. in 1977 from the San Francisco Art Institute. Before attending the Art Institute, Appleby spent a fifteen-year apprenticeship with an Ojibwe Indian elder in Montana. From him, she learned her patient observation of nature.

Her work is often shown with that of “reductive” painters, but it does not exactly fit into the “pure” painting philosophy held by many of them. As Kenneth Baker wrote in 2004, “using no forms except monochrome panels, Appleby must struggle often with the potential problem of repetition. But [she] achieves a freshness and distinctness that persuade a viewer that she means each one. It is as if she has learned to translate energy of intent directly into radiance of color.”

Although Appleby’s paintings are composed of abstract panels each essentially a single color, she thinks of them as landscapes.