The Realm of Flowering Plants
One Essay
A SHORT DISCOURSE ON THE NEW OBSERVATIONAL FLOWER PAINTER: Abridged
I have consciously sought to bring into being an evolved version of the classical art of flower painting as a separate intent from both botanical illustration and the still life genre.
The work is focused upon the realm of flowering plants, wherein I work as an observational flower painter. In so doing, I refer equally to the botanic realm of flowering plants, and to the history of flower painting. I have used the term Realm of Flowering Plants since 1986, to describe this duality.
My work has no recourse to dramatisation, but to silent observation. I refrain from anthropomorphising the flowering plants that are the subject matter of the work, and do not refer to them as ‘plant portraits’. In this way, I aim to demonstrate something that may be understood as an experience of the strange beauty and innate power that flowering plants reveal when we face them without the filter of personal need.
I have sought to bring the development of Flower Painting into the 21st century by separating it from the still life genre, and re-establishing a devotional attitude to this ancient art and as a commitment to a multi-dimensional awareness of plant life, based on who we are and where we are now.
My work is preoccupied with the interpretation of gravity and one aspect involves the investigation of spacetime and the quantum particle, which I express through the realm of flowers. I began this aspect of my work as a student in 1974, when studying abstraction at Chelsea College of Art and Design, with the painter Sean Scully, and through the training of large brush calligraphy in Japan in 1979. This led me to introduce the notion of space to the flower painting genre and to go beyond the dated and conventional understanding of a flat background.
The subjects that this work is focused upon include not only the flowers themselves, but also those which have the potential for flowers, or support the growth of flowers, such as fruit, seeds, stems, leaves, and roots. I often represent hybrid garden plants, and include root or stem storage systems of plants such as the peony, tulip, lily and iris. I have a particular liking for individual flowers that have been cultivated by human intervention and for competition. I also observe those which are grown commercially, focusing upon the ethical implications of our edibles and our garden flowers.
The thread that binds these separate classes is for me a lifelong interest in both managed and wilderness landscape and horticulture. As an artist, and a life-long gardener, my views arise from being in close contact with plant life on a daily basis. I grow many of the plants that paint and draw.
I do not travel by air flight, which I relinquished in 2009. I could no longer justify this activity. I regularly invite all artists who practice under the banner of botanical art to think clearly and decide upon this same course of action, as many landscape painters have now done.
My work is observational and I work directly and only from life. I am free from dependency upon photographic reference material. I work only within north daylight in the studio and full spectrum daylight in the field. I do not use artificial light in the studio.
My on-going work with weather patterns through the making of visual phenology works is unique in the sphere of flower painting and my interest in documenting changing weather patterns and their effect on horticulture and garden flowers has become an emerging context in the botanical art genre.
My work is understated in a mannered and English fashion and my ambition for this work is for it to bear witness as a devotional action towards our ongoing love and responsibility towards the realm of flowering plants on a number of levels, both seen and unseen.
Coral G Guest, Hertfordshire, 2016
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