Botanical and Natural Studies

The exhibition shows works in watercolour and detailed pencil drawing. This is a series of images which show native and cultivated specimens. Some taken from the artist's allotment others found in the roadsides and parks of Lewisham.  The shells are more exotic, but were chosen to show a difference in form and texture. A gift to the artist.

The work seen here reflects an interest in texture, form, strong lighting, the play of shapes in sunlight, and the joy of navigating around a seemingly uninteresting form or flower. Showing the ordinary and everyday in a new way. Marvelling at the beauty in the natural world.  For to be lost in an image is to be temporarily suspended from the miserable realities of the everyday world. Happiness, to home into to a pertinent contemporary concern, lies not in material wealth but looking beyond the veil that covers the visual world, to a place of imagination and dreams.

My imagination (the artist says) has always been fired by a couplet often quoted when describing Samuel Palmers work: -'Vain Man, vision of a moment made, dream of a dream, shadow of a shade.”

And Blake's iconic words, 'To see a world in a grain of sand, hold infinity in a flower…” These images of flowers and shells offer an opportunity to escape and to dream.