In 1995 Anastasia Lewis bought a tube of Titanium White. She used it infrequently, and over time the label on the tube became translucent, revealing a prior label. It read: ‘Sean Scully 18/4/93’.

Lewis admits a debt to Scully in her new landscape paintings. She has studied his work closely and talks about his ‘edges’, his unashamedly modernist manner and feelings of melancholy. It is perhaps not unrealistic, then, to talk about the shadow of Scully grinning through Lewis’s canvases.

The landscape Lewis chooses is not the sweeping Romantic vista of Turner’s Lake District or the verdant English underbelly of Constable’s Suffolk. It is the flat land of eastern Lincolnshire, a bleak hinterland sparsely populated and seldom visited.

The artist herself is an intermittent visitor to the area. Her canvases are wrought in a London studio. A location is visited and revisited but not lived in. That said, this is a place the artist knows well, a place wherein she identifies. Arbitrary choice it is not.

Indeed there is nothing random in these landscape paintings. Lewis works them with close attention to detail, employing her own particular colour-swatch logic whereby tones are over- and sometimes also under-laid.

The paintings whisper Modernism and nod at Lewis’s heroes, Scully and Donald Judd. But they are not simply homage, they possess something that is also quite individual. There is feeling here, both for the history of painting and also for the peculiar ‘badland’ landscape, which Lewis renders with the most tender of brushstrokes.

Lewis has been working in this way for around two years, and her upcoming exhibition at Bend in the River is the first opportunity to view a substantial body of work.

Artist resume

Anastasia Lewis was born in London in 1943. She studied Theatre Design at Central School of Art, London, and from the mid-sixties to 1990 was a theatre designer and costume designer, supplying and making costumes for many major television series and films. She returned to Central in 1992 to study Fine Art. She presently lives and works in London and Lincolnshire.

Exhibition history includes: ArtFutures, Contemporary Art Society, London; Kettles Yard Open, Cambridge; Eastern Open, Norwich; The London Group, Barbican, London; and Jerwood Drawing Prize. Her work was first shown at Bend in the River in 2003.