At her first solo exhibition, held at Helen Lessore's Beaux-Arts Gallery in 1957, Anne Said showed drawings. They depicted natural forms, sometimes in realistic compositions, as in her drawing of a gnarled root,) Jo's Wild Wood (1961, Tate), or arranged all over the surface of the picture, as in The Dried Sea, in which dead leaves, curling ivy and the spiky cases of nuts lie in front of a desert, bones protruding from the sand. Said found some of her subject matter in Britain, while other works reflected her stay in Egypt from 194] to 1955, including Camel Bone by a Stream and Aswan from Sirdar Siraar Island.
Said studied at Queen's College London in the late 1920s, and then briefly in Paris under Amedee Ozenfant, working as a textile designer to pay her way. After moving to Egypt she taught alongside her husband, the artist Hamed Said. They both exhibited with a group of their students in Cairo in 1948 and 1955, in London at the Arts Council in 1949 and in 1952 at the Islamic Cultural Centre. Said's work was also seen in the English/ Egyptian publication The word and the image-
Said returned to England, exhibiting in the New Art Centre and elsewhere. The Langton Gallery, London, held a show of her drawings in 1973. Her daughter Safaya also became an artist, having trained under her mother, and developed a career as a painter, illustrator and textile designer. |
