frank

Anna Dusk

Exhibition Dates:
Thursday 1 October – Saturday 24 October, 2026
Mon-Fri: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Sat: 10:00am – 3:00pm
Sun: CLOSED

Opening Celebration:
Friday 9 October, 2026
5:00pm – 7:00pm

To be frank is to discard the mask of politeness and pretence. These portraits convey a direct expression of feeling, often ambiguous because of its complexity. The uncertainty of meaning encourages a still observation of the face so as to understand what is being silently communicated.

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Artist Statement


‘frank’ brings together a collection of portraits of women, each of them set against a single-colour background. There is no detailed interior or landscape giving context to or distraction from the person being viewed. The face, more often than not, is larger than life. With each painting I’ve chosen two or three vibrant colours for the clothing and background, in contrast to the subdued tones of skin, hair and eyes. This minimalist approach forces an immediate and uninterrupted encounter with the woman facing you. Some sort of alchemy happens during painting with such a simple palette – a moment is reached when, with the addition of one more colour, the whole painting comes alive. It leaps out and demands your attention.

It’s only when living with a painting do you understand the life they hold. Colour is not a static thing, varying with light it can change quite dramatically throughout the day. Different aspects of the painting are highlighted, layers of paint revealed, and, together with the glow that oil paint emits, its luminosity, the face really does begin to breathe. It is not human but it is also not an inanimate object – you see a fullness of body and feel an emotion within. Putting colour and a human together is endlessly fascinating.

I work with photos – of friends, daughters of friends, friends of the daughters… often finding them on instagram. I ask people for photos, very rarely I use a photo I’ve taken. I like to be alone in the studio, and to use subjects who are unposed, moments caught without much regard for how they look, or the complete opposite, those whose regard for image is paramount, a posed selfie. I don’t aim for an exact representation but rather to convey a feeling.

As a child I spent hours looking at a book of photos called The Family of Man, the catalogue of a photographic exhibition held at MoMA, New York, in 1955. The expressions of people, how they held their bodies, what they were doing with them, were so curious. There was this wordless story that accompanied each of them.

I’m a novelist as well as a painter, so I’m interested in story. I love it – it has a pull that can shift your whole world. When you write a novel the story is very structured – it contains a beginning a middle and an end, which is rarely how life works. The story within a painting is much more like life – it is a wandering thing that is never really knowable. There is a free movement to the story, an unfolding, that isn’t determined by me the painter but by you who are experiencing the painting.

A portrait has someone’s life within it. In a way you are listening to a person sharing this but without the use of words. There is a silent communication of a story that does not have an end and, ultimately, is mysterious. Language acts as a filter, a buffer between us and living. It puts a wedge between us and the object we are considering, the action we are doing. Without words there is an immediacy in the transmission of information from the object, the painting, to you, the viewer. This is meditation. In this sense these paintings are meditative pieces.