[Image: Anna Coatalen, Quay (1938), wood engraving on paper. © Annik Coatalen Heal, 2019]
Anna Coatalen, née Hook (1916-2011) was born in Bristol. In 1935 she enrolled at Byam Shaw School of Art, London, where she studied printmaking, with a focus on the woodblock engraving. The great boom of the woodblock engraving and woodcuts revival of the 1920s had ended with the Great Crash of 1929 but that was an economic recession rather than a change in aesthetic fashion. (This was precisely the period that Escher struggled to find collectors for his woodblock engravings.) There was a market – albeit reduced – for book illustrations. Her prints are in the style of Agnes Miller Parker and Eric Ravilious.
Quay (1938) is a fine example of a complex design playing with space, transparency, layers and depth in which the artist has deployed a wide range of mark-making. It is her most ambitious and successful print. Other subjects are rustic types, views of vernacular architecture and animals. These prints are more modest in scale and complexity. They are charming but slight. The wood engravings build tones and textures through parallel lines. There are a handful of lithographs (including colour lithographs) were made just before the war. Many of the prints are undated.
The Second World War interrupted her work. Following her marriage to a Frenchman in 1946, she moved to France. This period is when she made linocut prints and greetings cards. These have a degree of freedom when they are independent prints but they are necessarily simpler and stylised when they are illustrating cards. The subjects are her new surroundings – fishing boats and people in traditional Breton clothing. These seem to become more sporadic over the 1950s and cease at this time. The text does not explain how many prints Coatalen produced and over which period. Most of the post-war prints are undated.
From the 1950s until her death, Coatalen produced watercolour and oil paintings and drawings of landscapes, buildings, family members and animal pictures, created in her Berkshire and Brittany homes. There is evident desire to produce art that records the pleasurable and to give pleasure. Also documented are the attractive stained-glass windows she designed for a church on Ile Tudy, Brittany over 2003-8.
Annik Coatalen Heal, Lachlan Goudie, Anna Coatalen: Art for Happiness et Bonheur, Unicorn, 19 April 2019, hardback, 140pp, col. illus., £25, ISBN 978 1 912 690 077
© 2019 Alexander Adams
To view my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art
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