THE ILLUMINATED DIARIES OF ANNE BERG PAINTER.

“Showing yourself to the world and hoping someone else understands” R. F. Kwang

Anne Berg’s diaries started as secondary to her painting but over time became increasingly elaborate illuminated documents – works of art in themselves.

Anne created this painting in 1996 to celebrate her illuminated diaries, several thousand pages chronicling her struggles as a woman painter and mother. It depicts the mains themes of her art: children, animals, nature and home and the perennial struggle against patriarchal attempts to control women’s dreams and desires.

Anne Berg was born in London in 1942 and has been a painter for well over 60 years. Academically trained she has a BA in Fine Art from Newcastle University, where the painting masters were Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, whose philosophies she rejected. She also has an MSc in Industrial Design, honing her distaste for a technological world in which profit trumped beauty.

As a young artist through marriage and the upbringing of small children she found herself trapped and many of her early paintings show her despair, yet mingled with strength and determination to survive. For much of her life she was a politically active painter, part of the Women Magic Group with whom she exhibited widely and internationally. In mid-life increasing foreign travel enriched her work taking her into more ecological themes.

Anne Berg developed a unique life affirming style which she has likened to “the strength of plants able to push through the concrete which smothers the earth…with an inner life breaking through the veneer of false reality…a force in our art which will one day re-inherit the world.” Her paintings “are a blaze of brilliant colour…hot oranges, brilliant purples and reds, deep emeralds and peacock blues pouring out of the openness and glory of Nature, denying the destructive power of patriarchy. They have much in common with Celtic decorations in The Book of Kells, but they are also part of women’s spiritual struggle.”