Wild about flowers
The passion behind the Wild Women of the Flowers artworks
It’s no secret that I love flowers. Wherever I go I’m on the look out for blooms of any kind, they call to me from neighbours gardens, wild meadows, roadside hedges, untended and pruned, I’m captivated by them all.
My camera roll is bursting with blooms, plants, leaves, grasses and trees and much in between. The seasonal changes are a time when my camera finger is at it’s hottest!
Rosehips, sloes and hawthorn berries dazzle me with their popping colours in late summer and early autumn and the hint of new buds and shoots tantalise me with anticipation in early spring. The intricacy of the plant structures fascinate me; the tiny hairs, the intersections of the stems and leaves and the interlocking pods of seed heads. I take photos for research and reference material for my work and purely for the pleasure of it.
In the very quiet moments when I’m in amongst the flowers and foliage, I sense the vital quality of the blooms. They enchant me with their beauty and playfulness, they are so light and free. It’s this feeling that sparked my journey to create the Wild Women of the Flowers.
Each flower has its own personality which becomes evident as I begin to draw the shapes and structures of the petals, setting the tone for the artwork. The women are embodiments of the flowers personality. They simply appear in the image as and where they please, alive with the spirit of the plant. The images are a metaphor for our need to play and savour the moment, simply enjoying being.
It doesn’t matter whether I’ve seen a flower once or hundred times, the beauty and delicacy continues to captivate me. So drawing them is a joy that keeps on giving, meaning I can study flowers and create artworks that show their hidden secrets.
I enjoy researching the flowers first by taking photos, if possible, then I work on composition by creating pencil sketches prior to working digitally in Procreate. Procreate gives me so many options to work with transparency and overlay which gives the flowers a magical quality.