She paints while sitting low to the ground with rocks as her easel, working amongst the pressure of the elements to translate what she sees in condensed sessions.
Zanna goes on painting trips and gets excited by the energy of the Scottish weather and the big horizons. In this surround, she feels a sense of calm that allows her to be in the moment and concentrate on getting as much down in paint as she can. She paints while sitting low to the ground with rocks as her easel, working amongst the pressure of the elements to translate what she sees in condensed sessions. She describes working in this way as an ‘adrenaline inducing time stopping feeling’. When she works in her home studio, those experiences lead her to different pieces which are not always topographically accurate but have a sense of where she had travelled to. The sense of returning to place and repeatedly visiting the same sites to paint focuses her vision. She has been painting Tiree for 10 years but even closer to home Loch Rannoch, Loch Tay and the road over to Crieff are repeated subjects she returns to. Sometimes she heads east to Elie, Crail and Cullen. She has also investigated Edinburgh through an ink series, a subject she is also revisiting.