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Articles> Anita Klein and Nigel Swift
Image published
with permission of the artist
In
Nige Takes Advantage a husband cuddles his wife and fondly slides
his hand into her bra while she tries to set the table for breakfast. Porn?
Heavens no. It is one of Anita Klein’s witty paintings in which she
celebrates those instances in her life she treasures the most.
Those moments, she feels, do not centre around holidays, weddings or birthdays
but are the very moments people do not capture on camera because they are
so ordinary and fleeting that no one has a chance to record them.
Anita’s inner radar senses the monumental in the everyday. For her,
the most precious times involve her family – that split second during
breakfast around the kitchen table, for instance, when the world slows down
and makes her gulp because life is so infinitesimally beautiful.
‘It’s not that we never have arguments or sadness,’ she
says in Cambridge where she has been exhibiting for the past 25 years. ‘It’s
to do with wanting to celebrate the moments that seem very fleeting. And
to do with the feeling of tenuousness of life and how incredibly lucky I
am. I’m sure everyone gets it. If for some reason your whole life
was swept away, what would you miss?’
She refers to her collection of work as ‘the real photo album’,
and in many ways it is. Her prints capture intimate and personal domestic
scenes, and are always of a woman who bears a close resemblance to Anita.
The images, she says, are, and aren’t, self portraits: ‘They’re
about what it feels like to be me, not what I look like.’
More importantly, she hopes that when people look at her imagery, they see
themselves.
Earlier this year, to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary, Anita
and her husband Nigel Swift have held their first-ever joint exhibition
in Cambridge.
Having driven up from their London home, they settle into a comfortable
banter over a double espresso and a cup of peppermint tea. Anita does most
of the talking and Nigel’s asides are self- depreciating and funny,
very quickly mirroring the gentle humour evident in Anita’s work.
That Anita is successful as an artist is immediately apparent. Her work
is held in numerous public collections and in 2003 she was elected President
of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Her curriculum vitae is long,
with her paintings fetching up to £3000.
Both she and Nigel studied at the Slade, but it was Anita who first began
exhibiting in London twenty-five years ago, building up a portfolio that
has led her to exhibit both nationally and internationally. Her most recent
exhibitions have been at the Bankside Gallery, the Boundary Gallery and
Advanced Graphics Gallery, all in London, and at Cambridge Contemporary
Art in Cambridge.
Having married straight out of art school, Nigel’s career took a more
conventional route. For twenty years he worked in advertising and special
effects and during the early years had little time for his art. Anita, at
home with their children, worked on her drypoint plates on the floor of
their council flat in order to print them out at evening classes. Space
was in such short supply that they used a plan chest for a baby changing
table and it wasn’t until the youngest was out of nappies that they
could finally afford a small printing press.
‘I don’t think either of us had any idea you could ever make
a living out of selling pictures,’ recalls Anita, whose original plan
had been to teach art as soon as the children were at school. ‘The
beauty of being home with two young babies was that I didn’t have
any real expectation of earning any money. I remember, we had a bottle of
wine when I sold a picture. One picture!’...
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