About
Anji Main is a visual artist working in the expanded field of painting. Her work is described as contemporary abstract, and takes in painting, painting-based sculpture, and performance.
Anji began her training in Fine Art in the 1970’s, but it was to be some decades later that she once again revisited conventional art education taking both a BA and an MFA, graduating in 2011, and specialising in abstract painting.
Having also trained at one point as a dancer, Anji developed a fascination for rendering the sense of bodily movement onto a canvas in paint, as an absolute prerequisite of any painting, but in abstract terms also illuminating the processes she was developing for the making of her work, and seeing painting as a kind of choreography:
“In a painting, all the gestures that make up the brush and body strokes on the canvas exist at once, simultaneously. This is expressed in a multi-layering of image and pigment. My paintings are made very carefully in this fashion, built up layer by layer, and then sometimes reduced and built up again.
The result can often be very complex, it draws the observer into a multidimensional field of action, maybe in a similar fashion to the way that the dancer draws the eye of the spectator in performance.
I think of my paintings as performances that somehow stand outside time, where all the temporal elements exist simultaneously, leaving the eye free to explore their dimensions at will, in any order that presents itself, subjectively, to the viewer.”
Anji is not keen to constrain her work under any particular label and is clear that the paintings must “work” or hold their own as visual images irrespective of any interpretation, but she does leave her viewers free reign in interpreting the images for themselves, believing that the paintings are there to communicate in some fashion not necessarily accepted or explained in orthodox terms.
This in turn led her to consider the “psychic” origins of art, and she has also recently received training to work as a mediumistic, or intuitive painter – a related yet separate practice which you can read about here.