Artwork by Ingrid Cole who recently moved to the steampunk town of Oamaru.
A garden can help with relaxation and inner peace, but if you don’t have a garden to hand, or the garden you do have is too cold and wet right now, then a good alternative is a garden to colour-in. The book Secret Garden by Johanna Basford has sold over a million copies worldwide and …
Italian painter Nicola Simbari (1927-2012) translated the energy, vitality and brilliance of plants onto canvas with a palette knife. Grasses, trees, bouquets, fruit – plants as the main subject or as decorative appendage to equally colourful women or landscapes – both draw the eye and steal the show. These artworks are a tonic for a …
La Scarlatte is the name of Amsterdam based artist Pauline Teunissen’s one-woman design studio. Her work consists of detailed, elegant, hand-drawn designs inspired by nature. She creates individual artworks as well as surface patterns for product packaging and book covers. For inspiration she cycles over the canals of Amsterdam in search of hidden urban visual …
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 …
When I was younger, I always had my Pentax camera (with zoom lens) around my neck. I took many many pictures of just about everything. What caught my eye was the pattern of Fritillaria, the chocolate lily. Delicate flowers, a simple two flower vase arrangement, were magic to me. Soft and slightly out of focus. …
Bangkok based illustrator and artist Suthipa Kamyam depicts elements of the natural world in great detail, letting form and shape dictate her vision. She brings intensity and density to trees, movement and mellifluousness to flowers and foliage; capturing the living, breathing, often hidden, energy of it all. Her reduced colour palette and whimsical names add even more emotion to …
If anyone is visiting the Canaries for some winter sun, then look out for the outlandish plant Dracaena draco, a.k.a Dragon tree or just Drago. A native of Macronesia and Morocco, it’s very exciting to see a mature specimen in the wild, rather than how we might usually see it here, growing as a house …
Finding fresh ways to represent plants is no easy thing. Varying the perspective, taking obscure viewpoints, playing with abstraction, looking at fine detail and engaging with elements of surrealism, are all possible approaches. One artist that utilised all of these was Mauritis Cornelis Escher (1898-1972). The son of a Dutch engineer, he studied architecture, graphic …
Lee Krasner, Self-Portrait, ca. 1929 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art Lucian Freud, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening, 1967 Gilbert and George, Nettle Dance, 2008 Joni Mitchell, Clouds, 1969 Natalia Goncharova, Self-portrait, 1907 Anthony van Dyck, Self Portrait With a Sunflower, c.1633 Umberto Boccioni, Self portrait, 1905 Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Lampion Fruit, 1912 Frida …