Mandy Hudson lives and works in London. She studied at Maidstone
College of Art (KIAD) and has shown in group exhibitions in the UK and
internationally. These include Re-Assemble at Collyer Bristow Gallery
2019; TheMarmite
Painting Prize in
2016; Flowers
of Romance, White Conduit Projects, London 2015, MK Calling at the Milton
Keynes Gallery; One Day, Gallery Korridor, Reykjavik and The
Contemporary Art Societies Art Futures at
the Bloomberg Space in 2007.
She has frequently depicted plants in her
work. Originally these were specifically in an urban enviroment; weeds growing
out of cracks in pavements, small trees on waste-grounds, office plants and
flowers in windows.
More recently she has been focusing in on
the plant-forms themselves. On short trips out of London she has spent time
making small watercolour studies of individual plants, working
these up into oil paintings and prints in her studio.
After completion of a
Diploma in Graphic Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
(Australia), Anita Barley worked as a professional botanical illustrator with
the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne from 1977.
She performed this role for sixteen years, working mainly on the
illustrated Flora of Victoria project, completing hundreds of coloured and
black-and-white plates for this major scientific reference work. She also
provided illustrations for scientific papers, the Flora of Australia, and other
projects.
Since departing from the botanic gardens in 1992, Anita has continued to work
freelance, providing further illustrations for scientific publications,
together with other botanical paintings and commissions. She has twice been awarded the Celia Rosser
Medal (2002, 2006).
In 2013 Anita relocated with her family to live in the Royal Botanic Gardens
Kew, where she continues to produce extraordinarily detailed botanical and
other nature-themed artwork. She has
contributed plates to Curtis’ Botanical Magazine and also for the Kew Bulletin,
and has also undertaken commissions. In 2016, Anita was chosen for the Jill
Smythies Award for Botanical Illustration by the Linnaean Society, London.
Lale trained as a printed textile designer, graduating with a 1st class degree from Chelsea College of Art and Design before working with Sir Terence Conran. After designing with Terence and gaining the experience of the commercial marketplace she believes that good design can be made affordable. Lale had the ambition to work for herself, she loved to draw from an early age and believes that pictures transform a room’s aesthetic dramatically. So, she decided to become an artist, selling affordable prints and taking personal commissions. Her training as a textile designer can be seen in her work as the detail and craft of her drawings are what make them. Her appreciation of quality materials, sense of design and colour give her work a sophistication and freshness.
‘My favourite medium to work with is pencil on paper. With these simple tools I capture as much detail as I can of my subject, creating highly detailed drawings. I sometimes add colour with gouache paint which suits me to work with because of the paint’s characteristics. The colours are strong, they can be carefully layered like watercolour but are versatile by being opaque with a soft chalky finish. I love to work with clients on commissioned projects. My website has examples of my work including pet portraits, and drawings of buildings that are the perfect wedding present.’
Though Mary Ellen was born in
New York, she had more adventurous plans. University in Washington DC turned
into a brief career in graphic design, a few years of studying art in London
and a job in adventure tourism in NYC which led her to settle in the Galapagos
Islands, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador.
South America to London
After two decades
of earthquakes, volcanic and political eruptions, motherhood, divorce and a
handful of creative business opportunities, Mary Ellen returned to London to
pursue a Diploma in Botanical Painting at the English Gardening School located
in the Chelsea
Physic Garden– an adventure in itself.
Chelsea Physic Garden
Mary Ellen was the Diploma
Course Manager at The English Gardening School for 7 years and painted in her
spare time. Most of her artwork focuses on the plant’s relationship to its
habitat, from places close to her heart.
Returning to Galapagos
In 2008 Mary Ellen
was sponsored to return to the Galapagos in celebration of Darwin’s 200th
anniversary, to research and paint the six most endangered birds and their
habitat. The resulting watercolour paintings continue to raise awareness and
funds for the Galapagos Conservation Trust, based in London.
Butterflies in Chelsea
In 2011, the Chelsea Physic
Garden commissioned Mary Ellen to paint the butterflies found within the garden
and their nectar source. This was done to honour James Petiver, the
‘grandfather of British butterflies’ and past demonstrator of the Physic Garden.
These watercolours were used for a series of note cards sold in their shop
reminding visitors of the delicate environmental balance of this special
garden.
Eleanor Percival is an artist from South London with a BA and an
MA in Illustration from UCA Maidstone and UAL Camberwell respectively. She
works mainly in watercolour and runs a small business producing paper goods,
homewares and accessories.
Percival’s work can be decorative or narrative, but it’s always
lovingly made. With influences including Ancient Greek pottery, Renaissance
painting and Indian miniatures, her paintings are delicate, stylised and
usually a little wonky.
Her interest in nature, and accordingly a love of painting leaves
and flowers, comes from her parents: obsessive gardeners both.
Sarah Graham’s work is uniquely beautiful. Her twisting,
flowing, sensuous flower forms, executed with a restrained elegance yet a
contemporary brio and layered with ravishing colour, have an echo of Isnik art.
Some have an even more distant orient form which influences her pale delicate
drawing, while others executed in bold chiaroscuro, recall Japanese ink
paintings. Here is an artist who knows her metier intimately and faultlessly,
and who has studied her subject with diligence and devotion. Sarah’s paintings
and drawings are a delight to the eye, mind and heart.
Sarah Graham was born in Edinburgh in 1973. Between 1992 and
1996 she completed two MA’s at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of
Art in History of Art and Fine Art. Graham travelled extensively for many
years; Australia, Turkey and the Far East, culminating in a journey on
horse-back across Central Asia in 2001. Discovery Channel bought the film
“Beyond the Mountains of Heaven” that Graham co-filmed. She also spent many years
in the USA working for Antiques Dealer John Hobbs. Graham lives and works in
Chelsea, London and has two children with husband James Holland-Hibbert.
Natural forms, insects and the plant world provide her main source of
inspiration, either borrowed from the Natural History Museum or forming
collections from her travels in the studio.
Diana Mercado is an Ecuadorian oil painter living in London
and the US.
‘My
paintings evolved from memories of my childhood in Ecuador. It was a
childhood where stories of superstitions, spirits, ghosts and water always
surrounded me. It was not unusual to walk our gardens and imagine elves and
fairies that might inhabit the luscious walks, full of ferns, hydrangeas
and the water lilies of our pond. It made me believe such magical
creatures
could only inhabit a world full of light and vibrant colour.’
The memories travelled with me to New York and later to London, where I
worked on “Amapolas.” When it came to finding inspiration, I relied heavily
on those childhood memories, remembering the feeling of awe in nature but
most of all its treasured peaceful calm. The woman immersed in the pond is
by no means trapped in the water, she’s embraced by it and has become a part
of it by giving herself completely to the absolute purity of the natural
habitat. It is a mystery to the viewer whether she’s Nature herself,
admiring the beauty of her creation or perhaps a nymph taking in a moment
of drowsy oblivion. Regardless, the feeling is of powerful but quiet
celebration. This woman has come far, travelled long and for a short while
she’s enjoying a moment of meditation.’
A group show to celebrate Flora and Fauna in its many forms alongside Chelsea Flower Show 2019.
We hope you enjoy the eclectic mix of artists who have all kindly allowed us a snap shot of their artwork to celebrate the Flora and Fauna of our beautiful world.
Exhibitors Include: Diana Mercado Mandy Hudson Eleanor Percival Sarah Graham Mary Ellen-Taylor Anita Barley Mariella Baldwin Lale Guralp Zack Mclaughlin
With guest speaker: Richard Barley, Director of Horticulture at Kew Gardens
Artist-gardener or gardener-artist? Although she divides her time equally between these two art forms, Kate Corbett-Winder is first and foremost an artist. Like many artist-gardeners, she uses her garden as a laboratory for her art; her flower beds are constantly evolving – living palettes for experiments in colour, texture and tone, structure and layout, testing grounds for studying the effects of light and shadow at different times of day and in different seasons of the year.
Although Kate has been gardening seriously for twenty-five years, she only recently turned to the garden as a subject for her art. Previous exhibitions featured her elegiac landscape paintings: Montgomeryshire’s vast grey skies and rolling hills, an isolated house in a distant field or a jumble of farm buildings in the cleft of escarpment. Then Kate’s studio was a caravan at the edge of the woods: now she works from a converted outbuilding where she can nip out at any moment to check an atmospheric effect, photograph a particular tone, pick a stem to study it closely or crop an offending branch. Fascinated by the way plants ‘speak to each other,’ she is always playing with the flower borders, adjusting them to suit her exacting eye: cutting off, cutting back, digging up and shifting if she notices plants getting too close, or too dense, or too tall or too orange – although orange is a colour she has recently come to love.
Over the years Kate’s palette has grown more vivid and exuberant; in both garden and canvas she has moved from muted greys, creams, greens and blues to more dramatic magentas, purples and corals. Where white used to predominate, now black reigns: exotic shapes and mysterious depths dominate her paintings, as black elder, sweet William and cosmos have replaced pale valerian and hesperis which used to accent her herbaceous borders. Kate tries to work in the garden every day from early spring until the last dahlia has succumbed to frost at the end of autumn. Her gardening complements her painting but her art does not depend on the weather; she paints in her studio every day, regardless of the season. And when the garden is truly dormant she finds inspiration in daily woodland walks where she picks up seed heads or bare winter branches. Spiky cardoons, papery hydrangeas, rose hips, hellebores and those defiant little Welsh poppies that pop up all year round provide further subjects for painting in winter.
Kate photographs her garden obsessively and when a subject grabs her she can spend hours building up a composition, only to scrape it all back to start again, leaving a faint pentimento as testament to the earlier image. Often she works on several canvasses at the same time, moving from one to the other as the light changes or the mood takes her. Although largely self-taught, Kate draws on the tradition of Modern British artists, whose work she and her husband William have collected over the years: Winifred Nicholson’s luminosity, Keith Vaughan’s textured layers, Christopher Wood’s moody primitivism. She follows the mid century English landscape painters – Ivon Hitchens, Peter Lanyon – in using loose composition and bold swathes of colour to move beyond mere figuration. Patrick Heron inspires her too, in the way that Eagles Nest in Cornwall was the catalyst for his abstract garden series.
Further afield one senses the visionary spark of Odilon Redon’s symbolist flower paintings or Cy Twombly’s mysterious, romantic collages, which like Kate’s, combine words, scratchings and splatters of colour to create vigorous, haunting images. While drawing inspiration from the best of the century’s artists, Kate’s work is sui generis: richly textured, multi-layered, luminous, provocative and exhilarating. Her poppies are both vibrant splashes of life and harbingers of something more sinister. Her slashes of blue and spatterings of yellow are clearly larkspur and daisy, but interpreted with the trancelike, shamanistic exuberance of the abstract expressionists.
