South African artist Daniella Mooney (b.1986) paints plants, which is not that surprising considering she lives and works in Cape Town, giving her access to one of the six recognised floral kingdoms of the world, not to mention Kirstenbosch, a national botanical garden with around 22,000 indigenous species. Cape Town, a place of exceptional beauty, …
Bluebonnets at Twilight, near San Antonio – Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1919-1920 True blue plants have a natural allure due to their rarity. Landscapes dominated by these blue plants are even rarer, yet because we have Bluebells in the UK, are also somewhat familiar. There are relatively few plants that bear truly blue flowers – Gentian, Lupin, Monkshood, …
Self Portrait by Christian Schad (1927) Having a narcissus flower staring you in the face can only really mean one thing – you’re a vain so and so. Not that the flower symbolism in Christian Schad’s Self-Portrait is really needed, as the artist’s obsession with showing off his chest in a see-through top, rather than …
If you haven’t the time to make your own Christmas cards this year, and you want something more original for your loved ones than is available on the high street, then crafting sites like Etsy are the place to shop. Millions of individuals with artistic persuasions are selling homemade cards to buy. All sorts of …
Today, to buy an original Tiffany lamp, you will need to pay anything from a couple of thousand to over a million pounds. Reinforcing our belief that botanical is always best, the lamps that are more in demand today are the brighter coloured floral ones that became iconic emblems of the Art Nouveau movement. The original Tiffany lamps …
American sculptor Richard Tuttle’s I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language installation currently occupies the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, London until 6 April 2015. This really big, orange and red, flowing and luminous winged thing combines “vast sways of fabrics” made from both man-made and natural fibres (ie plant product), hanging from …
There are always modicums of plant beauty to be found, even in the most urban of streets. It is likely though, that often we don’t take up those viewing opportunities because the specimens in question are either too small, too common, or in places where we just don’t think to look or need to stop. …
Paris is really something. All those huge sweeping vistas acting as a backdrop for pain au chocolat and cool french people. When in Paris, an art interested first-time tourist typically does the following – Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and Pompidou Centre – before heading, time permitting, to other places of interest; one such possibility being the …
If you look at any patch of overgrown grass, unless you get low-down and close-up, it can look rather homogenous; green vegetation, absent of flowers with colour, is often overlooked. Yet what from a distance may seem similar in form and colour, on closer inspection is usually a more extensive collection of uniquely growing plants, …
Aubergine, eggplant, brinjal, Solanum melongena – call it what you will – this fascinating plant is an explosion of form and colour. Originally a small fruiting, bitter tasting plant from the Indian sub-continent, thousands of years of cultivation worldwide has produced what we see today, an edible fruit, that we think of as a vegetable, …