Annie Freud– teacher, embroiderer, painter, poet and brilliant party giver- is the daughter of Lucian Freud, great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein. She is also the proud owner of a new studio at her home, Peace and Plenty, in the heart of Dorset. Here from a window seat, which I would describe as more window bed, she has a view of fields, her husband Dave’s sheep and the slow train to Bath.
The studio “is a first” and, along with a dedicated space for Dave means their interests which involve “paint, mud and dirt” aren’t a problem. And she’ll have the occasional sheep for a neighbour in the adjoining animal pens. It is now also home to her father Lucian’s easel which she inherited following his death in 2011 and on which currently she has just painted a “portrait” of The Fox and Hounds Pub, her local and home to the Cattistock Poets.
I’ve got to know Annie over the last 5 years through the Cattistock Poets which she started and leads, encouraging writers to find and listen to their own poetic voices, “to make it better..and to take it seriously”. She has also been responsible for organising some fabulous poetry readings to which she has invited a variety of other published poets.
Her latest collection, The Remains, published this summer, contains 2 of my favourite poems – Aubergines and Abbotsbury, the latter which I heard Annie read in a beautiful, small, ancient Dorset chapel as part of a Christmas carol service. The Remains is her fourth collection and has established Annie as one of an exciting new group of poets – and a performer firmly committed to poems being heard.
The Remains is , however, proving an artistic turning point- another first- combining 2 loves, the visual and literary, the book illustrated by Annie with original paintings, some inspired by the Dorset landscape. When “I started writing poetry..I thought I would embroider in the mornings and write in the afternoon” but she found that this wasn’t working so put the visual to one side though found this “painful” needing this element to produce “something I would try to make more solid. I’ve painted all my life with pleasure but without enough self-belief but The Remains changed all that.” I asked her if her renewed need to paint was a rearrangement of two loves but she said that “was too easy, that one should not have self-limiting views of who you are or what you can do” and that painting fulfilled a physical need.
But whatever the medium Annie is committed to work that will “move, disturb or delight” the point being “what it is doing to other people”. She has also had another first this December with the setting of her poem The Sun Looks Forward to Winter to music by Benjamin Tassie for three female voice and hopes this time next year to see her first London painting exhibition happen.
As for Peace and Plenty- not her own invention but the name of the 2 cottages which form her very peaceful and plentiful home.