Anny Servais, who died on May 21, was not only a very fine artist but also an amazing personality. She had an powerful sense of humour and always took a sharp look at the world. Anny was 42 when she made her first painting in the Creahm workshops in Liège, Belgium, replacing knitting as her main creative outlet. She experimented with all techniques and used any surface to hand, including walls, floors and furniture. Once started on the artistic path, she was irrepressible. Yet three lifetimes would not have been enough to satisfy her hunger to create.

Her first works were abstract essays in free, elegant and sinuous calligraphic marks, with her signature featuring numerous times on each piece, as much a part of the composition as an identifier. The new millennium marked a significant turning point in her artistic journey, when she introduced collaged elements of photographs, photocopies and magazine images into her work, enabling a more direct figurative element to emerge. Her unique method of incorporating found images into a highly gestural painterly manner places her among some of the most powerful and original artists of her generation. She had a way of taking images of both friends and strangers, and far-flung places, and making of them a thoroughly believable, often poignant, personal narrative telling of love, desire, erotomania, food fetishism and fantasies of motherhood.