ART PRACTICE

Anthea Callen trained as a painter and print maker at Birmingham College of Art and Design (now Birmingham City University), in the UK. She went on to study and establish a career in art history and visual culture, while maintaining her art practice (see GALLERY).

Anthea Callen is a painter whose primary interest is in the human figure and its form, studied through drawing and colour using a wide range of mixed media from oils to pastel and inks; she undertakes portrait commissions. She has also consistently worked in collage to explore non-figurative ideas of colour, form and space and since 2000 has been experimenting with painted abstracts, working with acrylics on hand-made paper and now also on canvas.

Anthea Callen's practice is informed by her art-historical expertise, including her specialist knowledge of historical artists' materials and techniques. This is particularly relevant to her colour work and her oil painting. She has studied artistic anatomy as well as formal life drawing of the human figure. This interest crosses over into her art history work, where she researches the historical use of anatomical study in art as well as artists' training in the discipline. She is currently researching and writing on painters' studios in France 1800-1914.

Anthea Callen began exhibiting her work regularly in the early 1990s; she has had a number of one-woman shows and has participated in group shows mainly with other women artists, and including three Warwickshire Arts Weeks (see EVENTS).