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The water meadows stretching across 50 acres of the Southrop Manor estate in the Cotswolds, home to Thyme Retreat, reach their wildflower peak this month, when buttercups, campioniums, clover, knapweed and wild orchids bloom. Last year, artist Endellion Lycett Green was there to capture it. Plants have always seduced her. “It’s the wonder of nature and what can grow from a small seed,” he says. “It gives me a feeling of the sublime. A glimpse into something very mysterious.” The Wiltshire-based artist has been observing and painting nature all her life, but lately she has been studying plants closely, including the botanical compositions of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, perhaps best known for his early 19th-century engravings of the vast collection of Empress Joséphine. of roses at the castle of Malmaison.
This summer, the artist returns to the Gloucestershire estate showing a selection of botanical studies paying tribute to Redouté, along with large-format oil paintings, some of which are based on those days on the water meadows. His complex, layered compositions are almost abstract in his focus on form: the foliage of wild garlic overlaid on the forest floor; the almost metallic graphic sheets of Hydrangea macrophylla, occasionally punctuated by emerging deep pink flowers. His favorite subjects tend to have strong leafy forms (artichokes, spiky eryngiums) or the blue-green tones he is most drawn to, especially in glaucous rose.
“There is something elusive about the way he manages to capture the very essence of plants,” says gallerist Laura Lopes. Lycett Green’s pieces, she adds, are part of a renewed and urgent focus on the natural world, “a longing for flora and fauna.”
When Isabel Ettedgui first appeared Oisín ByrneIt is pastel tones Cut flowers At Connolly in June 2021, they sold out in the first 24 hours. The following year he exhibited his large-scale serigraphs, which sold equally well. This summer he shows a triptych of smaller-scale prints. It’s not just the colors, the feeling of nature and the dynamism of those images that make them irresistible. Ettedgui says: “Oisín’s work is really about something more than floral exuberance: the flowers are almost incidental, almost abstract, like a dance on the paper.” And of course, implicit in any cut flower, he continues, is “that little window of perfection before everything deteriorates.”
Memento mori was also in Clara Woods‘he thought when he took up painting floral themes after an operation in 2020, and his friends sent him flowers instead of visits. His sensual, richly colored paintings are markedly contemporary but also speak to the sumptuous studies that Édouard Manet made when he was confined to bed in the last year of his life. Each begins with photographs, which she reduces to a line drawing that is in turn transferred to aluminum panels. She paints on the flat metal sheets, mixing colors as she works and pushing the paint onto the panel. Ella Woods then creates collages, using thousands of pieces of wallpaper accumulated over years. The process is so long that, she says, “it’s almost going back to the painting and seeing what else is there.”
Long dismissed as a “low genre,” floral studies are being re-evaluated as part of a broader revival in still life work. Last year, Woods, a royal academic, filled a room, wall to ceiling, with still lifes by 200 artists at the RA Summer Exhibition. “I wanted to see what the painter was doing in general,” he says. And last month, Pallant House opened The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain including works by Woods alongside Vanessa Bell, David Hockney and Lucian Freud (whose own plant studies were examined at the Garden Museum last year). “It’s always been a little out of the ordinary in contemporary art,” Woods says of the still lifes. The return to the domestic, he adds, is not a surprising change. “The world seems like a very unsafe place. Thanks to social networks you can see everything without a filter. And it is constant. There is no rest. It is news 24 hours a day.”
Inevitably, the climate crisis is often woven into the narrative about plants today. Jelly Green began painting large-scale studies of Germanic irisen plein air, having been presented to the flower by her teacher Maggi Hambling, who in turn had studied with Cedric Morris, a prolific breeder of the flower. “The first thing we draw as children tends to be the nature around us, which is also intertwined with many of the fairy tales we read,” says Green, perhaps best known for her large, lush canvases of forests and woodlands. “When painting en plein air, there is a sense of immediacy and a time limit that keeps things fresh. But you also experience nature in a totally different way, seeing how the plants change throughout the day, how the light rises and falls on them.” On a trip to Borneo the devastation of nature hit her. Returning to her studio, she later took an entire canvas of green plant life and began painting on it with vivid hot flames, the beginning of her Burn Series that confronts us with the reality that nature faces. “I couldn’t really keep painting these tributes,” Green adds. “I have to paint the truth.”
In art, the precariousness of nature is evident. Earlier this spring, the small-scale canvases of the late, reclusive American artist alberto york They were revalued when they were hung on the Loewe AW24 catwalk in Paris. A collection of 18 paintings included intimate portraits of vases of flowers or a green landscape, contained within small, narrow frames. When asked why nature was her subject so often, York said: “I think we live in a paradise, this is a Garden of Eden, it really is. It may be the only paradise we know, and it is so beautiful that you feel like you want to paint it.”
Endellion Lycett Green will be at Thyme until September 4. thyme.co.uk. Jelly Green and Lily Hunter Green: Conflagration is at Snape Maltings until June 23. brittenpearsarts.org