Brush off that snow and warm up to a brush of vibrant colour instead.

The Plantasia Collection is an ongoing project that highlights botanical art, and showcases it in a series of watercolour paintings by Calgary artist L.C. Cariou.

Another year another series started! This one is bringing it back to flowers and gardens. Which are always some of my favourite paintings to work on! I love the variety of colours, textures, and differing levels of delicacy that I get to interpret through paint. To me there is nothing more appealing to paint than plants and nature.

It has been ages since I have written a post here. I apologize for that but I have been consumed with commissioned paintings since June, which is exciting and I am very thankful for! Fast-forward to December now. I find myself with some time carved out where I can continue working on this Prairies and Lakes (2020- ongoing) series I started many months ago.

This series focuses on Canadian lakes and prairies in Saskatchewan, specifically around Jackfish Lake, which is a short drive north of North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

I am a dedicated tea drinker. I start my day in the studio with it and end the day with a nice hot cuppa. I have never been much of a coffee drinker, though I have learned to drink what my mennonite family calls “a polite cup of coffee”, which is essentially to accept a cup of coffee when that is offered over tea and is the expected drink.

Kew’s Princess of Wales Conservatory (2019) was one where my ambition clearly got away from me. I was enchanted with this temperate house at Kew Garden’s, brimming with a variety plants, home to plants from 10 different climate zones! This painting centres on the wet tropical zone of the conservatory, home of the iconic Victoria amazonica waterlily’s, I believe my ambition grew to match the 2.8 meters of them. Nevertheless I made my way slowly and surely through the painting and after many painstaking hours I finally finished it. After-which I boasted for months that it was my masterpiece. 

At the beginning of the month I finished my series of British Horticulture paintings! For now! There will probably be a part 2 someday, but for now I am moving onto another topic! But I wanted to do a bit of a recap of the whole series as a wrap up, and go into some of the details about the paintings individually and what it was like painting them.

This is a tale in which I share how I came to use the watercolour paints and palettes that I do and a story of coincidence and serendipity which follows. 

My visit to Kew Gardens in June 2018 provided me with most of the images for my series of paintings which I am near to finishing. This was not intentional however in the nearly 2000 photographs of gardens I took on that trip it appears that Kew is extremely photogenic!

Do you ever find yourself rooted firmly in one group yet entranced by what exists in the other?

Welcome to the Curiosities! A place for pondering, sharing and discovery! You may wonder what to expect in this curious corner? For which my response is I may be able to tell you a little. However I may not be able to tell you a lot.