Annabel Keatley received her BA in Painting and Drawing at Edinburgh College of Art in 1988, and her MA at Chelsea School of Art in 1989. The following year, she received the first of two awards from the Prince’s Trust to work with a Russian artist in Kyiv, Ukraine. The exchange led to Annabel's first solo show, funded by the British Council and The Princes Trust, which travelled from The Arbat Gallery in Moscow to West London. From there on she had solo shows in central London until her move to Spain in 1996.
During her career Annabel has won awards to paint in both Jamaica (The Triangle Workshop) and Andalucia (The Delfina Studio Award) and she led a Prince’s Trust ‘Partners in Europe’ creative project in Moscow with young Russians combining papermaking, puppetry, photography and theatre. In 2020, she was awarded a place in the annual ‘Sowing Seeds’ artists residency in Rajasthan, India, where she worked with local children in a tribal village on a project combining papermaking and simple printmaking techniques.
Annabel now lives on the Granada coast surrounded by mango orchards, with views of both the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and the Mediterranean. Working with oil and encaustic, watercolour and making her own paper, Annabel paints richly textured mixed media semi-abstract oils and watercolours, often en plen air. Her work can be found in public collections in Edinburgh, Brazil, London and Moscow and in private collections worldwide.