Fabric designs are teeming with botanical and floral artistry this Spring as always – plants are always on trend, every season, in one form or another. We particularly like those designers that avoid the well-known plants and floral cliches, going instead for something different. Ferns seem to be popular at the moment with both Sanderson …
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 …
Plant Curator was lucky enough to see Yoko Ono perform (music) at the Royal Festival Hall c.2005. She was a petit, yapping, avant-garde wonder, shiningly entertaining at that. She currently has a major retrospective of her career that spans five decades at Guggenheim Bilbao. It shows just how much she has achieved. She is her …
Poverty, madness and creative genius, unfortunately often makes for a good story, which is why Plant Curator is keen to see the 2008 film Séraphine. Based on the life of French artist Séraphine de Senlis (1864–1942), it gives an account of her rather sad but artistically productive life. Born into a poor family of labourers and …
Street artist ATM paints naturalistic representations of endangered birds on empty walls in London. The birds are not tiny like birds generally are, but magnified to cover large expanses of brickwork or concrete. Take a look at his birds, they are quite brilliant. Set against manufactured surroundings, each bird’s colour and form seems strikingly exotic …
Usually you can see Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia at Tate Britain, but it was recently loaned out to Japan and now is in Turin, after that maybe somewhere else. It is good to share. For most interested people around the globe a digital or printed image is all that they are ever likely to …
Alex Monroe is a man that creates mostly nature-themed jewellery for women. He draws inspiration from the Suffolk countryside where he grew up and it’s his plant-inspired pieces that we like the most. All of his jewellery is pretty with a vintage, hand-crafted appeal, but it is much more than that, especially when he brings …
In photographer John Humphrey‘s ‘Pressed Flowers’ series he uses the scientific or vernacular name of the plant he captures. This, along with the close-up detail of the pressed flower he shoots, gives us an interesting perspective on these plants. The images feel very alive, all the more surprising considering the plants are not. He captures an interesting array of morphological detail, every …
When Plant Curator visited the Snowdrop Festival at Mapperton Gardens earlier this year, we came across the Snowdrop sculptures of Colleen Du Pon. Du Pon is an Ironwork artist and artisan working in Dorset and her own magnified representations of these small flowers were set among the garden landscape. Standing tall at nearly shoulder height, …
In recent weeks we have been directing readers to free botanical art in the Public Domain. If you need inspiration as to what you could do with it, look no further than San Francisco based artist Alexis Anne Mackenzie. A fabulous, successful collagist, Mackenzie sources much of her primary material it seems from old natural history …