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.

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.