Mary-Anne Bartlett is a travel and wildlife artist who will help you respond to movement, habitat and colour. Happy to sit for hours in almost any climate or cultures, she’s going to show you that it’s possible to sketch anywhere.
Sketching is what it’s all about for Mary-Anne, not exhibitions and shows. She developed a habit of carrying watercolours and a travel sketchbook while at Art College at Exeter and Strasbourg (CIM Dip M, DNSEP Strasbourg, BA Comb Hons Exeter) and sees these tools as the artist’s passport to integration into communities around the world. She regards her art materials as her real passport. Through painting and sketching you also observe, see and remember the world around you more clearly.
Art Safari is Mary-Anne’s brainchild, dreamed up while travelling in Malawi in 1999. She developed the idea of Art Safari from a short art course in Liwonde National Park into a full range of itineraries around the world, spurred on by the huge enthusiasm and wanderlust of Art Safari guests.
During the pandemic Mary-Anne introduced Art Safari’s Virtual Holidays and workshops as a way to keep us all motivated to sketch and dream. She and Claudia Myatt have also continued the highly popular Speed Sketching Thursdays – for an adrenaline fuelled hour of sketching each week. They are joined by artists from around the world.
Mary-Anne is a cultural chameleon and happy in many countries, cultures and languages. She is especially well known as an African specialist. As great-great-granddaughter of explorer botanist and doctor Sir John Kirk, Mary-Anne has travel, and Africa, in the blood. Kirk explored East Africa on the Zambezi Expedition with Dr David Livingstone in the 1850-60s before becoming Consul General of East Africa in Zanzibar. She takes after these early explorers – both Kirk and Livingstone also travelled everywhere with their sketchbooks. She enjoys being with creative people and relishes the challenge of artistic styles and personalities in each safari group.
Her artwork ranges from the detailed to the expressive and she is well-known for her minimal representations of animals which verge on a Japanese distillation of fleeting moment. Her detailed water-colours of landscapes lead you wide vistas of timeless beauty, whilst her minimal drawings and prints of African wildlife capture those fleeting moments of interaction between wild animal and the silent human watching in awe.
Mary-Anne is the Director of Art Safari, so spends much of her time at Art Safari HQ on admin things when not kayaking or leading our tours.