Grandma Moses

CinemaSerf

Anna Mary Moses has spent much of her near eighty years living on the farm. Having married young, she reared ten children with her husband before a few dexterity issues in later life led her to try out painting. In many ways her works are a little like LS Lowry’s more industrial scenes. Not grand scale works of art, nor beautifully detailed still lives; these are more natural scenarios painted from what she can see of her rustic and seasonal surroundings or, quite poignantly, from what she can remember from her younger years. I must admit, I found the narration quite bland, the soundtrack distinctly twee and at times the whole look of this made me think that “Rebecca” was going to arrive from “Sunnybrook Farm” any minute, but once we settle down with her and watch her prepare her wood-board canvases with three layers of white paint before her local landscapes delicately come to life, we become a little more engagingly immersed in her imagination. The photography could have taken more long shots of her works, giving us more perspective, but what we see here isn’t meant to a be a critique of her work so much as a look at a lady creating images from a bygone era.