Still life with jug of flowers

‘I was terribly keen on light - high-pitched light - and shadow, and used more of an accidental quality than I have ever done since. But all the same, they weren't ever what you would call photographic or realistic paintings, even still-lifes done in a college in a still-life room. My friends used to say "Of course that's not really what is in front of Anne, she's just made a vision of something that she has seen", which meant that even then it wasn't actually a completely realistic translation of what was in front of me, it was still just a kind of vision, a translation of the vision that I had seen from these white dishes and some flowers on the table. I would arrange a group of dishes, flowers, on a table, and I didn't depart all that far from the thing in front of me. Lots of other people thought I did depart quite a distance, you know, and they didn't like my idea of things that seemed quite real, and yet looked as if there was no law of gravity, and I have always had to explain that I wasn't interested - and nor was a painter interested - in the laws of gravity.’

- Anne Repath talking in a BBC film about her paintings, 1961