Ann Penelope Young

Ann Penelope Young (1946-2011)

Ann in her own words, written for her website...

"I was born and grew up in Banstead, Surrey. I always had a love of the visual arts and visiting London galleries - my favourites being the impressionists, most particularly van Gogh. I never thought of painting myself and made a career in the NHS as a nurse, teacher and senior manager. Interest in research and writing led to a second career in academia. When my life was changed by widowhood and early retirement I decided I wanted to try to paint but it wasn’t until I saw some silk paintings at a craft fair that I became aware of this medium. Two workshops later and I was hooked! Although initially I took the more traditional craft route, I was more inspired by the construction of larger paintings. Forever experimenting with different techniques and setting myself new challenges, I am passionate about this medium."

Ann with husband Roger Taylor

"Although Ann has gone, the memories of her vibrant presence can never be forgotten, as well as her achievements."

Her art work developed from her initial amateur enthusiasms into a professional proficiency which produced an amazing range of different high-impact visuals, ranging from illustrating her love of nature in her bird and animal portraits, through her seashore scenes of shells and seaweed highlighted against a beach, to vividly coloured strange stark imagined landscapes. Her impressionistic "Crossing of the Swale" contrasts the new and old bridges over to the Isle of Sheppey, the new portrayed as a curving structure and the old as straight and angular plotted against a blue and white sky and intense greens surrounding the bridges.

Sadly this site is a tribute to a lady who is no longer with us, taken away in such cruel a manner in April last year when she succumbed to an asbestos related cancer, Mesothelioma, which she contracted whilst walking the underground pedestrian tunnels of Guy's Hospital which, unfortunately, were also the means by which pipes lagged with insulating material containing asbestos carried the heating system throughout the hospital.

Ann's death was by a cruel fate caused by working in a place that she loved to work and where she said she had the most fond and happy memories. Sadly as the disease started to make its appearance, though undiagnosed for a long time, a couple of years before her death she was unable to maintain both the stamina required to complete the delicate and time-consuming task of silk-painting. Sadly also her hands became swollen so she was unable to hold the paintbrushes.

The tragedy of her terminal illness, obviously and most disastrously for Ann, is also a tragedy for ourselves and for the world at large, as, until the onset of her illness, she had reached a level of expertise and had developed a never ending font of ideas for new paintings which were forever springing into her fertile and ever active mind. Her talent and her huge potential have been lost forever, and we shall now never see those scintillating works which were in her mind's eye only and which would have come into existence had she lived.

Though she had once seemed indestructible, as she was a source of irrepressible magnetic energy to all who knew her, she succumbed to a most terrible disease which makes its victims suffer enormously. No matter how much of a fighter for life she was, with positivity coming out of her every pore, she was no match, and the end when it came was a blessed relief to her and all who witnessed her suffering.