Forget Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst – where are their plants? Our favourite of the celebrated ‘Young British Artists’ that studied at London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s is Gary Hume (born 1962). A painter who fairly recently (end of last year) had a retrospective with another of our favourite artists Patrick Caulfield at …
Meryl Watts (1910 – 1992) was born in East London and worked predominantly as a painter and woodcut printer. After studying at the Blackheath School of Arts under the tutelage of another eminent British colour printmaker John Edgar Platt (1886-1967), she went on to achieve success in her own right, exhibiting at both the Royal …
Last week we showed the work of an artist who uses human bodies to create portraits of plants – today it is the other way around – where portraits of people are formed of fruit, vegetables and occasionally other things. Today’s artist is a little less contemporary. The Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was employed at the Habsburg Court in …
The second instalment of our two-part series of tree paintings. On Friday we showed 20 paintings by women and today it’s the men’s turn. It is interesting to note the type of tree that is chosen as subject matter, and how they handle the respective rendering of these vegetative masterpieces. 1. Lucian Freud – Acacia, …
Part one of a two-part series of tree paintings. Today we feature female painters and then on Monday it’s the men. The aim is to show comparative renderings of these spectacular plants by some of the most renowned female artists ever. Although we have numbered them, this is not a rank, just a way to …
Some old free botanical cacti art today from the book: “Iconographie descriptive des cactees, ou, Essais systematiques et raisonnes sur l’histoire naturelle, la classification et la culture des plantes de cette famille“. Which translates (roughly) to: Featured iconography cacti, or systematic and reasoned essays on natural history, classification and cultivation of plants in this family. …
Yesterday we looked at a 19th Century natural history artist with enduring appeal, today we focus on an outstanding modern day one. Rachel Pedder-Smith is a contemporary botanical artist who achieved acclaim for her Herbarium Specimen Painting, first exhibited at Kew Gardens in 2012. At five meters long, this large-scale watercolour montage of plant bits …
Patrick Caulfield, CBE, RA (1936 – 2005) is a celebrated UK artist, immediately recognisable for his bold, reductive, outline heavy creations of everyday objects. The critic Christopher Finch described him as a “Romantic disarmed by his own sense of irony”. He somehow managed to paint very little but portray so much. Although considered an ‘urban …