Biography Annie McManus

After graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, Annie followed a varied career path juggling children (lots and lots of children), with writing murder mysteries, providing illustrations for Private Eye and Punch, and even designing gardens. When the urge to draw could no longer be resisted, she began a straighter path towards her MA in Drawing at Wimbledon Art School.
Drawing had always been Annie’s first love. Painting came later. Now she doesn’t really distinguish, working with charcoal in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, most of her work is an energetic synthesis of the two. The drawing seems to act as a control over the painting and the painting to liberate the drawing. One thing she hates about any work of art is an air of polished and smug finality. What she wants to achieve in her work is a feeling of “becoming”, of the work being still potentially in a state of change.
Using different means of making marks, mixing mediums and allowing conscious choices to be tempered by judiciously manipulated accidents helps her to keep it so.

Background:
1971-74 BA Hons in English Literature, Newnham College, Cambridge
1997-99 Fine Art Foundation, City College, Brighton & Hove
2002-04 HND Fine Art Foundation, City College, BA 2003, Brighton & Hove
2004-06 MA Drawing, Wimbledon School of Art