30" x 20" each
To view Drawings and Paintings separately
- AC Drawings (9)
- Drawings by Fanny (10)
- Paintings (35)
The Battle Scene
detail below
To read the amazing story of the Cavalry Battle Scene (6ft x 4ft) and how Anthony came to paint it in the National Gallery , London at only 10 years of age - click here:
The Battle of Anghiari by Anthony Christian
Anthony Christian's version of Rubens' copy of the lost Leonardo da Vinci painting.Anthony's drawing is 22" x 29" drawn in New York in 1985 whilst he was suffering from hepatitis after a trip to India. The doctor told the person who was looking after him that he would not survive. It took a week to finish the drawing ... and Anthony survived!
The Drawings of Fanny by Reggie Oliver
“I started drawing on July 10th 1999 in India” Marian Fannon told me “.....I had never studied art or drawn a thing in my life before that. Just got the urge one day and when Anthony [Christian] saw the results, he encouraged me to carry on and so it went.......” What the artist Anthony Christian saw was a sense of form and a distinctive approach to the medium. One notices immediately a decorative skill, a facility for filigree detail, and a warm yet subtle sense of colour. If this were all Marian had to offer hers would be a very pleasant if minor talent, but look closer and you find a strong compositional sense and what I can only describe as a mystical insight. I was first attracted to Marian’s Mandala drawings because, while holding fast to the profound spiritual qualities of the traditional Mandala, her versions invested the old form with new life, a new-minted freshness, a vibrancy of colour. Her animal drawings have a similar appeal. Starting with the original beast, be it elephant, rhino, cockerel or some other creature, Marian launches into a surreal fantasia of colour and decorative detail. And yet somehow, almost miraculously, she remains true to the essence of the creature she sets out with. Recently she has been experimenting with floral and semi-abstract patterns. These are among her finest pieces because they retain and build upon the two pillars of her art, a strong sense of form and a joyous exuberance of colour and detail. The collaborative work with Anthony Christian adds yet another dimension to her art. The harmony of these pieces and their distinct quality are such they appear to be the work of another major artist, not the work of two. Should he/she be called Anthony Fannon or Marian Christian? You decide. Reggie Oliver
Granturco by Anthony Christian
GranturcoDrawing in charcoal pencil
highlighted with white chalk on
hand tinted paper
The Cat in the Plait by Fanny
Ink drawing by Fanny Christian
40 x 30 ins
A witch in a hat had a cat in a plait
Who wandered all over the house
He crept up the stairs and leaped over chairs
In search of a juicy mouse.
On one of his jaunts, in one of her haunts
The cat saw a beautiful fish
A - hangin’ around, way high above ground
It looked like a tasty dish.
A sight to behold, its colours so bold,
The cat was enthralled by the vision,
There dangled some cheese, and a mouse if you please!
Oh no! What an awful decision
He now had to choose and both he could lose
Deciding on which he would pounce.
A mouse or a fish would both be delish
But which was the best ounce for ounce?
Enjoying the scene , a bird that was green
Was watching in anticipation
With string in its beak, it couldn’t much speak,
But would soon thwart the cat’s delectation!
The mouse will be spared from being ensnared
As soon as the bird takes flight
They’ll fly off together whatever the weather
Escaping the cat’s hungry bite.
And the fish? Oh the fish! That beautiful fish
Will hang there, despite the cat’s caper
Its cheek still aglow and the net down below
Are made out of Japanese paper!
And the cat? Well the cat still wears the fat plait
And lives with the witch to this day
He still roams the house in search of a mouse
And sometimes a fish comes his way…
Courtesy of the witch of course!
The Drawings of Anthony Christian
Susan, half - face and Rose Drapery Despite all the vagaries of the modern art scene, the notion that draughtsmanship is the foundation of all good painting has never quite been abandoned. Good draughtsmanship is not simply about accurate representation - any halfway decent student in any halfway decent art school can achieve that - it is about developing the discipline to respond fluently and spontaneously to what you see before you. What characterised Anthony Christian’s drawings from a remarkably early age was not only an accurate eye, but a confident subtle line, delicate and yet powerful. Comparison with the drawings of Michelangelo and Leonardo are not out of place. Christian consciously modelled his drawing on theirs, sometimes copying actual drawings - like Leonardo’s Battle of Angiari study - with phenomenal verve and accuracy. More importantly he absorbed their dynamism and economy, together with their sense that a drawing is not simply a sketch or study for something bigger but a work of art in itself. Today Christian employs all kinds of medium, charcoal, sanguine, ink, and achieves a wide range of effects to suit his different subjects. His great tree drawings have a wonderful wiry vitality, his nudes a supple sensuality; while with his portrait heads and drapery studies he achieves an extraordinary sculptural quality in the modelling by the use of shading and highlights. In Christian’s drawings you find the key to his mastery of other forms. They are not a sideline; they are the heart and soul of his work. REGGIE OLIVER http://www.blackcathedral.co.uk/ right click to open in a new window
The Young Disciple, INDIA
THE YOUNG DISCIPLE
INDIA (Jaipur) 1985
This young yogi was one of the most beautiful people Anthony ever saw; full of humility, radiant with his truth, he seemed to glow, and Christian hoped to work with him on some major paintings. But in case the opportunity didn't present itself. as transpired to be the case, he made this beautiful and simple, but very expressive portrait study. It was painted in one short sitting in a little Hindu temple, on the morning of St. Valentine's Day .
7 - 9 OCTOBER 2010 - SAATCHI GALLERY LONDON
The Crucifixion of the Female Principle by Anthony Christian (image above) is the most highly valued work in the exhibition . Fanny and Anthony will also be exhibiting their collaboratiive painting Sail Away.
October 7th-9th 2010 the Art of Giving is hosting the largest ever sale of art for charity at the Saatchi Gallery London.
Paintings feature in "House and Garden" magazine this month
Two of Anthony's Mannequin Paintings featured in an article in this month's House and Garden (UK edition)
"I first met Anthony Christian in 1964..." by Reggie Oliver
I first met Anthony Christian in 1964 when I was twelve and he was nineteen. He had got to know my parents when he painted a portrait of a great friend of theirs. That portrait, despite its technical brilliance, was not universally popular because Anthony had revealed an inner sadness in the subject which many of his friends - though not my parents - were unwilling to acknowledge. He went on to paint and draw both my parents and myself and became a good friend, never for a moment talking down to the very naive teenager that I was. He influenced me profoundly because he was the first person whom I met, perhaps the only person I have known, who was and remains one hundred percent artist. That is to say: every fibre and impulse of his being is geared towards the creation of beautiful and memorable things. This accounts for the outstanding integrity and originality of his work; it also accounts for the extraordinary roller coaster of his career. He has never once pandered to fashion when his outstanding technical gifts alone could so easily have earned him golden rewards. That is why his work, though it has developed and evolved, remains of a piece and demonstrates a unique vision: sensual and yet austerely beautiful, passionate yet refined, witty and playful too. At the heart of his work, I believe, are his incomparable gifts as a draughtsman, evident from his earliest pieces, such as the Battle Scene, to his most recent masterpiece “The Crucifixion of the Female Principle.” As if this were not enough he is also a fine photographer and a superb writer of memoirs which must be read to be believed. But that, as they say, is another story. REGGIE OLIVER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggie_Oliver right click to open in a new window.
The Indian Kitchen
Jaipur, India 1986In the remotest village Anthony ever visited, he stayed in a house that amused him greatly, especially for its kitchen, which was full of holes! He painted various aspects of it, including even a study of just the door which was the house's most eccentric detail. This door and the surrounding wall were full of cracks so large that a person could easily pass through them into the house....and yet the owners still proudly locked their door at night, shoving great bolts across it, turning keys..and then proceeding to walk right through it! The hole in the roof (in fact half of the roof was missing!) pleased him too , as did the cowpats, which in India are intelligently used for fuel. In any Indian house, from the richest to the poorest, there is always water on the boil , for interminable cups of "char" (very strong tea with vast quantities of sugar). Anthony was delighted when, whilst he was painting, one of the inhabitants happened to throw off her shawl and leave it lying there where we see it, adding a beautiful splash of colour to the work. Such magical events make what might be a more ordinary picture into a sparkling interpretation of a way of life.
Nepalese Kitchen
Nepal 1987
With guides and a porter to carry his painting equipment, Anthony trekked through the mountains of Nepal, seeing more beautiful landscapes daily than he had seen in his entire life. Arriving in a little village called Mlimtsi , he was intrigued by a house he visited, the more so when his guide told him it wasn't a guest house but the home of ordinary people.. it was one of the most unique houses Anthony had ever seen, and he loved painting it. After he had completed the painting his guide asked him if he would like to see other houses before they moved on , and Anthony was absolutely amazed to discover that they all looked exactly the same!
His guide explained that this was Sherpa territory; the Sherpas, unlike the other tribes of Nepal, interest themselves, not in turquoise, amber and coral, but in pots and pans and kitchen ware. Since the variety of such wares is very limited in Nepal, naturally they all have the same things. The only chance they have of acquiring anything different from their neighbours is if they can come across something left by a passing tourist, of which there are very few in that region. In the case of the interior Anthony painted they had, (and they appear in his painting) a can of Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate and even a bottle of Dom Perignon!
His guide told him that added to this idiosyncrasy is the fact that the same family of carpenters travels around building all their shelves...and thus one finds similar things, placed in a similar order on similar shelves. Anthony's painting caused no less a sensation than had his hut in India, but this time he had his guide to show it to the excited crowd. He was surprised and touched when they arrived at the outskirts of the next village, to find a crowd of people waiting eagerly to see the picture. Some people had run ahead from Mlimtsi to tell the inhabitants of the next village of the painter and his picture. This continued for the rest of the day; at each village they passed through, scores of people greeted them, looked at the painting, recognized and enjoyed. Anthony was deeply moved.
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