On a painting trip.
Anna Le Moine Gray is an artist born in Brittany.
She studied architecture, philosophy and linguistics at Rennes (Bretagne) and Oxford universities. From childhood, she learnt about drawing and painting in artists' studios, including those of Philippe Lejeune (founder of the Ecole d'Etampes), Avigdor Arikha, Isabelle de Longvilliers and Camille Nuri.
At a very young age, she chose the path of art, expressing herself through painting, a language without words that gives to the acuity of her eye a way to be shared.
After thirty-three years in the British Isles, enriched by contact with other cultures, she returned to live in Cap Sizun, at the very end of the continent. It is by living here, day after day, that she is slowly re-discovering her landscapes. She has always walked to paint, « eyes open; heart beating », in all weathers, across this Breton landscape that she loves deeply.
Her practice is rooted in these daily encounters on paths that lead to exceptional places (at points of passage, of fractions between sea, sky, rocks, night, dawn). The experiences on these shifting shores become marks, drawings that lead to works on canvases, expressing the emotions inspired by nature.
Each painting is the result of a dialogue with reality. It starts with acute observation - a sensitivity to the spirit of the place, Genuis Loci.
It evolves through the joy of sketching along these paths; their memory becomes inscribed in her body through steps, the movement of the hand on the paper, the light, the colours, the sounds, the air, the fragrances...
It expresses wonder at the simplest life, at all hours and in every season.
Often the canvas is reworked, scrutinised for weeks or months, washed in white to leave only the essential, like a palimpsest, where the long journey towards accuracy can be discerned.
Her vision of landscape is rooted in tradition but infused with contemporary explorations; introducing the written word, graphics and decorative motifs; mirroring her literary and pictorial research.
She has exhibited regularly in mixed and solo exhibitions since 1984 and illustrated several books, winning prizes and commendations in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Anna Le Moine Gray is the author of Jersey, Portrait of an Island, a book of paintings and sketches, which was published in November 2009 and became one of Waterstones’ bestsellers.
From the launch of Rural Jersey until 2017, she was their Artist in Residence and was also asked to write a regular double page article on Art & Nature, a column she created.
In 2007, she was commissioned by The Jersey Arts Centre to create an exhibition based on Gerald Durrell’s book My Family and Other Animals to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its first publication.
Amongst Anna’s other Public commissions are the 2010 Jersey Heritage Portrait Commission; The National Trust for Jersey Commission of 64 bird paintings and a ‘page’ on the history of their Wetland Centre; a Diamond Jubilee portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; illustrated history pages for the Millennium Town Park in St. Helier, Jersey; a double portrait of Les Procureurs du Bien Public for the States of Jersey and many other portraits of official figures.
Since returning to Brittany in 2016, Anna Le Moine Gray has received a number of prestigious commissions, including creating the decorative motifs for a new bell at Saint Corentin Cathedral in Quimper (the first in two hundred years) and producing three illustrated maps for the town of Audierne (Finistère). She was guest of honour at the 25th International Island Book Festival, held on the far western island of Ouessant. She gave several talks on her work and presented an exhibition during that time. In 2020, she was invited to become a founding member of Pevarzek, an artists' collective created by the Institut Culturel de Bretagne to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Seiz Breur artistic movement.
In 2024, she was offered a joint exhibition in the Museum du Marquisat in Pont-Croix (Finistère) by the artist Tom Fetch. Incertitudes, a book celebrating their work was published for the occasion, with texts by Lily Le Brun, Jean-Luc Le Cleac'h, Ute Guzzoni, Gérard Klein, Agnes Martin and Frédéric Ohlen.
In 2025, she was invited to hold three solo exhibitions; one of them being in the Circuit des Chapelles du Tregor.
Her work has been the subject of regular solo exhibitions, including Entre Terre et Mer, an exhibition held at the iconic Maison-Phare du Millier (owned by the Conservatoire du Littoral, Finistère) to mark the bicentenary of the Fresnel Lens. She has won several awards and prizes amongst which are the Prix d’Harmonie for her portraits at the 2006 Carhaix International Celtic Festival; the design prize for Jersey Post; prizes at CCA Galleries International and at the Salon de Vannes for her illumination Anna Breizh war hent ar seizh sant diazezer. Her paintings have been chosen to be printed by the Bailiff of Jersey and Oxford University. They were also used as stamps by Jersey Post. Since 1985, she has been regularly invited to lecture and teach art in Europe and the UK.
Her paintings can be found in numerous public and private collections in France, Great Britain, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain, South Africa, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Sweden and Egypt, among others.
“I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around,
but standing around as though with your arms open”
Mary OLIVER Why I wake early
