Anne Marie Graham

Born in Vienna in 1925, Anne Marie Graham emigrated to Australia in the late 1930s where she studied at Melbourne Technical College (RMIT), the National Gallery School of Art (VCA) and the George Bell School. In 1959 she received an Italian Government travelling Scholarship to study under Emilio Greco and Oskar Kokoschka. Graham has been the recipient of numerous professional awards for painting and drawing including, The Springbrook Art Prize, The Australian Newspaper Drawing Prize, The Jacaranda Art Prize, The Carlo Levi Art Prize, The La Trobe Valley Acquisitive Prize and the Melbourne International Centenary Exhibition Award.

Two monographs on her work entitled; Images and Insights: The Art of Anne Marie Graham 2004 and An Essential Vision: The Art of Anne Graham 1988 by author Joan Ackland have been published by Watermark Press, Sydney and Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne. Anne Marie Graham's work is featured in numerous public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Japan, Europe, Israel, the USA and New Zealand.

Anne Marie Graham's art is a celebration of life. Her images, created during a career spanning now more than six decades, are beautiful records of the natural world and sympathetic depictions of her fellow human beings. Her insights are penetrating and affectionate.

As a young artist she made a conscious decision to paint only what was peaceful, joyous and kind and most of her early oeuvre is figurative: sensitive, often witty, depictions of the urban and suburban scene. More recent are pure landscapes as diverse as lush tropical rainforests, the historic Melbourne Botanic Gardens or the arid inland of Australia. Through Anne's eye and hand, busy streets and markets, Tuscan farmlands, French villages and more are distilled into their essence in both physical and human terms. The optimism in her paintings is infectious and Anne's cast of human characters embraces every generation, underlining her determination that life goes on in all its richness and possibility of renewal.

Extract from the foreword by Jane Clark from Joan Ackland's book, Images and Insights: The Art of Anne Marie Graham, published by Watermark Press, 2006, Sydney.