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Art - Botanical
Art Exhibition
The Society of Botanical Artists is celebrating its 21st year
and if you’re in London this weekend, it’s worth
checking out their annual pre-Easter Exhibition. This year it's
entitled ‘A Celebration of the English Garden’ and
it's taking place in the Lecture Hall of Central Hall Westminster.
There are over 750 works on show and two local artists, Jane
Orchard and Vicky Mappin are represented. ”This style
of painting obviously predated photography as a means of categorising
plants, and some say it is outdated,” says Jane, a Southease
resident whose work Crimson Parrot Tulip is one of
four she has in the exhibition. “But some artists choose
to exaggerate a particular element of the plant to make it more
obvious, and sometimes a camera doesn’t capture this salient
feature.”
Many think that such supernaturalistic representation of its
subject matter shouldn’t be considered ‘art’
as it contains no metaphor. Jane, perhaps surprisingly, tends
to agree. “For me, personally, it is not so much art as
technique,” she says. “But it’s not a soulless
process because to me it’s impossible to paint an object
in such detail without getting emotionally involved in the subject
and starting to love it.” And it is a painstaking process.
It took Jane, using an extremely fine brush and watercolours,
90 hours to paint Crimson Parrot Tulip. “This
sort of painting is becoming more and more fashionable,”
adds the artist. “The Chelsea Physic Garden has been offering
classes for a long time and they have become wildly popular
in recent years.” AL |
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Jane Orchard’s Crimson
Parrot Tulip: beautiful, but is it art? |
