Anna Paik

Born in South Korea, British painter Anna Paik won a merit scholarship to study drawing and painting with leading American painters of figurative art, Sidney Goodman and Will Barnet at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia where she won numerous prestigious prizes including W.E. Cresson European Travelling Prize, Benjamin West and Thomas Eakins Prizes. After moving to the UK Paik was awarded first prize in the 2003 Garrick/Milne Prize, a national painting competition, voted unanimously by the jurors including both Christopher Lloyd and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the last two Surveyors to the Queen’s Pictures. 
Anna has given solo exhibitions in London, Philadelphia and New Orleans along with many group exhibitions in USA, UK and Netherlands. Among juried exhibitions Paik has shown with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, New English Art Club at the Mall Galleries, National Portrait Gallery among others and was also represented by Wolseley Gallery at London Art Fair. Paik’s paintings are collected in Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Netherlands, South Korea, UK and USA.

”My painting is an act of invocation. I believe all visual arts share a common element; that of storytelling, expressing and ultimately invoking the essence of life force and all that could symbolise. In pursuit of creating paintings of depth and timelessness, I create to capture the lasting power of life that transcends the time and place. 

As Bernard Leach devoted his life to the art of fusing an oriental aesthetic with his own western sensibility opening up a new visual experience, I have searched and experimented to conjure up the spiritual quality of my Korean roots; that of purity and simplicity based on condensed memories of my childhood combined together with the uniquely western art medium of oil painting which is my passion.”

“…Anna Paik’s paintings of Korean pots absolutely amazed me. They ring with silence. There is a timeless quality to them which forces the viewer to leave behind the reference points of daily life and enter another world, another zone… And their emptiness is not a void but a symbol: if we approach any work of art with that emptiness which suggests receptivity and space we are more likely to be refilled and fulfilled.”
Stephen Hough, Daily Telegraph