Back in 2020, when we were having to stay at home a lot more, I had the time to take a closer look at our outdoor spaces. Both our front and back gardens are a bit ramshackle – I have been making sporadic changes over the years, mainly by planting roses!
I love roses and we inherited some beautiful ones when we bought the house. I have bought and planted six more bare root rose plants from David Austin Roses and they have done brilliantly, with only the occasional prune from me!
All the individual rose plants will feature in this 50 Flowers Project, (so I will save sharing them with you in detail until later posts!) However, I did spend many hours painting the roses in the summer of 2020 for a commissioned artwork – you can see it here.
In between studying the roses, I also began to notice how many flowers were in our garden, both cultivated and wild. We also took the opportunity that year to plant some seeds, of edible plants and some pollinator friendly plants which increased the number of flowers popping out to greet us everyday!
I felt inspired to make a few drawings and paintings…
…but busy with commissions, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to draw from life. Instead, I began to take photographs at different times of day, recording all the flowers that appeared. Below are some of the photographs I took of the flowers that appeared in the garden during 2020.
The idea began to form to start a flower inspired art project that would also be a fundraiser for charities; in particular, those that I feel try to make a positive difference to our natural world – the pandemic had brought even more into focus how important environmental issues are for our own health and that of the creatures we share it with.
I began listening to gardening and foraging podcasts, reading gardening books and visiting plant identification websites. For this project, as well as sharing my art, I would like this to be an opportunity to share some of the interesting facts I have discovered about many of the flowers in my garden.
I also realised that with my 50th birthday approaching in 2021, it would be a nice idea for this project to also be a creative celebration!
Initially, I thought to challenge myself to complete the project in the space of a year, starting on my 50th birthday and focusing on one flower each week. However, three significant factors soon made this initial plan difficult to achieve:
- As we came out of lockdown my art classes started again and, despite my best intentions, there’s only so much activity I can fit into one week!
- I have already identified already more than 50 flowers – wild and cultivated – growing in our garden, so I will have to partner some of the flowers for a few of the paintings.
- Once I began to start seriously working on the project I realised I wanted to go LARGE! One of my main artistic inspirations for this project are the large flower studies of the American artist Georgia O’Keefe and I really felt the urge to emulate the scale of her paintings….
….so O’Keefe will be the topic of my next post!
50 Flowers for 50 Charities 