British Horticulture Series - From start to finish (Part 2 of 2)
This is the second part of a post from last week, which is a recap of the series of paintings I just finished of British Horticulture gardens. You can read part 1 here, which contains the first five paintings of the series. Therefore this post picks up where it left off and contains the last 5 paintings of the series, and some of the details about the paintings individually and what it was like painting them! Off we go!
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.
From Kew’s Palm House Balcony (2019 - 2020) was finished after I took a 3 month break from the series (I worked on my other series that I completed in 2019 of some of Alberta’s great geological sites). The view from the balcony in Kew’s Palm House was one of my favourites, to see over the dewy canopy and be up high close to the amazing architecture of the palm house was a view I was not expecting to have in the Palm House. A delightful surprise that I had to capture in paint.
Kew’s Ringed Bellflowers (2020) is the second plant portrait of the series. I found them in the tranquil Davies Alpine house at Kew Garden’s. I didn’t know what the name of these plants were when I found them there, I also forgot to take a photo of the plants label yet again (lesson learned in retrospect), but I recognized the plant from my own garden back at home in Canada.
I was thrilled and over the moon about that. It seemed magical and serendipitous to find a piece of my garden at Kew even though I knew it was not. I loved the lighting of this painting and how big the plant feels, when it is truly no higher than a foot. Delightful. Also I eventually found out the true name of the flowers after some strategic tagging on Instagram which eventually got a reply! The magic of social media!
It was my original intention to have this painting be the last in this series. Because who does not like to finish a project on a simpler task? However I discovered that I needed a mental break from painting tiny bits of foliage and my green paints. So I moved onto working on a painting which was definitively not very green. Which took form in Portrait of a Kew Bromeliad (2020)! This was plant in Kew’s Princess of Wales Conservatory. I loved the vivid orange-pink of the plant as well as the waxy texture it. It felt both exotic and like an old friend at the same time. It felt fresh and vibrant, and I loved the perspective of getting up really up close and almost into the plant. It was just the change I needed to carry on before the final painting.
Looking Up in Kew’s Palm House (2020) is the painting I very much underestimated the difficulty of. It wasn’t that my ambition got away from me this time. It was that I was lured into the false sense of ease by the promise of white empty spaces. It also took me back to my green paints. I won’t lie I struggled to find a momentum to finish this painting because of this. Nevertheless I loved the view and perspective captured in the painting. Being able to decipher all of the individual plants in a small area within Kew’s Palm House seems impossible when everything is dense and overwhelming. But if you slow down to look at the individual elements you see how the whole atmosphere is created, as well as zeroing in on the amazing Victorian architecture of the Palm House.
This concludes this series of paintings. I love it and am ecstatic with how it turned out but am ready move onto another topic for the time being. I hope you enjoy!
Paintings and celebrations,
L. C. Cariou