I came to painting quite late, in terms of getting my degree and doing it full time, although I started painting in my late teens.
I would describe myself as a landscape painter, although my paintings are not traditional or necessarily existing landscapes - I have my own style of painting, it's very detailed and comes from things happening in my imagination but the images I depict come from all kinds of realities - elements of different landscapes that I have visited or lived in. I grew up in the Netherlands. You can see flat horizons in some of my work and I think that very much refers to my gut feeling of home.
I came to live in Scotland in 1991. It had always been a dream of mine to live on a rock somewhere in the North Sea, and coincidentally my husband at the time was offered a job on Orkney. We jumped at the chance - it was my opportunity to finally live in the kind of place I had dreamed of for as long as I can remember.
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I left Orkney to study painting at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and after graduating, I decided to move to Glasgow. There is a great community of artists in this city.
My previous exhibition Borderline opened in Glasgow after the pandemic. At that time, I was really quite focused and had a clear theme in my mind, and work, about boundaries and borders. After that I think I had quite a delayed feeling about the whole time of the pandemic and of course a lot of awful things were happening in the world with wars breaking out, and for me personally, some people close to me died. I was thinking about moving back to Orkney. Suddenly everything felt very up in the air, I'm sure that's a feeling a lot of people would relate to post pandemic, and that meant my painting practice became a bit more up in the air too.
I feel that in my current show, Where Are We Looking , not the work itself is, but the theme I am working around is less focused and is more of a question mark. The work itself is more transitional and pointing in a certain direction and some points more strongly than others, and this is of course very personal as a painter. I think I am still in a mode of transition and searching in my practice.
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I find it quite scary to live under this question mark. Suddenly even my painting isn't on solid ground and that has meant painting has been quite difficult over the last few years.
Despite that, the show has been very successful. As a painter you work in a small studio space surrounded by the work, living intensely with it. It's always good to get the work into the exhibition space and look at it from a distance on the gallery walls. Looking at it now, I am happy with it, and I can see much more clearly that some of the work is pointing me now in a certain direction and what I can build on.
Periods of that kind of uncertainty are part of a painters’ life, they are a part of all life, but it's not comfortable. But the feeling itself of discomfort can be overcome just by keeping on doing it, I just keep going and find ways through it. Painting is the only way I know how to search for answers.
Anna H. Geerdes – Where Are We Looking, at Compass Gallery, Glasgow, until 4 May, for more information and opening times, visit: CompassGallery
