In this wallpaper that William Morris designed, the striking effects derive from the use of non local colour to reinvent the distinctively golden flowers in blue. The effect is to cool the gold and to defamiliarise what could have easily been a cliched scene. Presumably, the inclusion of white in the scheme would have brought …

Australian artist Margaret Preston (1875 – 1963) painted or printed many of her native species to great acclaim. Below we take a look at some of those artworks to learn a little about the plants that were her willing subjects. Her work is so vibrant and characterful, it is wonderful to be able to view …

Up until recently Bristol based mixed-media artist Kerry Day’s focus has been on rendering the human form. These portraits are seductive, each one of her subjects, often nude, has some oddly arresting feature or presence. We are pleased to see, she has now turned her talents to plants, more specifically pot plants, and mostly cacti …

Like many great artists before him – Van Gogh, Matisse and Monet to name a few – in 1965 Andy Warhol turned his attention to flowers for a period. Although not really fitting with the modernist art movement of the time, this was the 60s and flowers had become symbolic of the peace seeking counter-culture of …

Paul Morrison’s monochromatic botanical landscapes give us a bit of everything we love. Firstly, he renders plants in a reasonably botanically accurate way, clearly taking inspiration from the shapes and patterns that plants produce. But he then shakes it all up a bit to great effect. Not only does he add some more cartoony impressionistic …

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 …

The Royal Academy of Arts has just got a new website. It’s a rather jazzy affair and continues the current website design trend of displaying information in a multitude of varying sized teaser boxes across a full-width page like patchwork. This design allows for a fast inspection of a lot of stuff with just a …