PLANT CURATOR
botanical artistry | imagery | creativity
  • Art & Design
  • Photography
  • Culture
  • Places
  • Free Art
  • Books
Home » Art & Design » John Pearce’s plant soliloquies

John Pearce’s plant soliloquies

February 4, 2015|Art & Design

If you visit the newly re-hung Guildhall Art Gallery, you will find a painting by John Pearce sharing space with artworks by Rossetti and Millais. While these great artists have undoubtedly rendered plants to beautiful effect, you can only stand back and admire, whereas Pearce’s plants, always the main subject, draw the viewer into the scene and into their world. Once there, if you take the time to really look (and listen), memories, sensations and understanding of interconnectedness are evoked. We have so much appreciation for an artist like John, whose work honours both the beauty and essentialness of plants. Some of his paintings and words are shown below, to see more please visit his website.

Artist’s website

I find a neglected corner of a private estate or garden: my subject is a community of wild plants growing in untamed abundance on the surface of the planet Earth and I present this centre stage, with the human world modestly in the background.

john pearce

Small, fenced-off, owned areas of the planet can offer a unique sense of closeness to nature and remoteness from ‘the world’.

Summer John Pearch

Although my representation of nature could be termed ‘realist’ – the sort of composition I favour is definitely post-cubist.

Wild Plants

There may be few parallels in poetry to T. S. Eliot’s tone of meditative soliloquy in Four Quartets, but I have found that painting can follow a comparable path in a quest for ‘the point of intersection of time and the timeless’.

John Pearce

Beyond the darkness of the enclosing hedge, the land slopes away, and one can see through it the blue, humid glint of a valley of chalk downland – it is typical of Chiltern countryside that the valleys are enclosed spaces of chalk grassland, while the hilltops are crowned with extensive beech woods, scattered villages and common land.

John Pearce

I completed the picture in four weeks, working eight hours a day. At the time this was the longest I’d ever spent on one painting, though now I can take four months or more. Meanwhile the brambles in the foreground grew rapidly and became the main subject of the picture..

Blackberries

Blackberries, biochemistry and daylight are, for me, unifying themes in the painting, but the naturally unrestricted process of drawing discovers many linked aspects, such as the spaces which emerge with vegetation and its growth, or half-hidden paths threading through the well-lit foreground to the dark background trees. Thereby an overgrown urban garden can come to speak for much more than itself.

Brambles

The name ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’, despite its genteel appeal, has never quite caught on. ‘Cow parsley’ means an inferior form of parsley, but association with cattle is appropriate to a flower of May, the fertile month when the sun enters the zodiac sign of Taurus, the bull.

Cow parsley

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Share
November 11, 2020 R L F Matthias

Related Posts

  • Stained glass plants
    Stained glass plantsJune 24, 2015
  • Plant in the room: White lily
    Plant in the room: White lilyMay 18, 2015
  • 20 minutes in South Asia with a smart phone
    20 minutes in South Asia with a smart phoneApril 24, 2015

Popular Posts

  • 88 free vintage medicinal plant illlustrations
    88 free vintage medicinal plant illlustrationsApril 21, 2014
  • Species list for La Primavera anyone?
    Species list for La Primavera anyone?March 23, 2014
  • Species list for Millais’ Ophelia anyone?
    Species list for Millais’ Ophelia anyone?April 15, 2014
← Susan Pearson: Why I paint flowers
Plant design by La Scarlatte →
Follow Us on FacebookFollow Us on TwitterFollow Us on PinterestFollow Us on EmailFollow Us on rss

Popular Posts

  • 88 free vintage medicinal plant illlustrations
    88 free vintage medicinal plan... April 21, 2014
  • Species list for Millais’ Ophelia anyone?
    Species list for Millais’... April 15, 2014
  • Species list for La Primavera anyone?
    Species list for La Primavera ... March 23, 2014
  • Talking vegetable cartoons of Berger & Wyse
    Talking vegetable cartoons of ... April 1, 2014
  • Botticelli’s flowers to Valentino’s dresses via Celia Birtwell
    Botticelli’s flowers to ... January 19, 2015
  • Flower collages of Ted Feighan aka Monster Rally
    Flower collages of Ted Feighan... March 6, 2014
  • The ultimate Californian deserts in bloom photographic road trip
    The ultimate Californian deser... March 5, 2014
  • The Dave Hill effect
    The Dave Hill effect February 9, 2014
  • Fake flowers tell the truth
    Fake flowers tell the truth February 7, 2014
  • Interview with Coral Guest: Flower Painter
    Interview with Coral Guest: Fl... January 14, 2015
  • Creatives with Plants
    Creatives with Plants December 16, 2014
  • Plant in the Room: Magnolia
    Plant in the Room: Magnolia November 24, 2014
  • Plant in the room: Narcissus
    Plant in the room: Narcissus November 11, 2014
  • What species is Monet’s Bodmer Oak?
    What species is Monet’s ... September 23, 2014
  • The Top 5 Identification Guides for UK Wild Plant Photographers
    The Top 5 Identification Guide... July 14, 2014

About

Plant Curator selectively collects creations to build a digital athenaeum of plant beauty and application in the arts. Designers that work in nature or plant-related fields will find inspiration for design and content here. In this way we help botanical creatives learn from other botanical creatives.
Read More

Area of interest

Links

  • Submit to Plant Curator
  • Directory

Email

Your message was successfully sent. Thank You!

© 2017 plantcurator.com. All Rights Reserved
%d bloggers like this: