From kitchen window sill to gallery wall: A new collection of Kalanchoes paintings
Flaming Katy
The cheerful supermarket kalanchoes plant (commonly known as a Flaming Katy) and a hand made ceramic pot, dotted in circular buttons, are the star of a brand new botanical painting collection. The collection takes a deep dive into composition, surface pattern and a personal connection with favourite colours and how they work in harmony.
Drawing in the in-between
In the in-between of last Christmas and New Year, a quiet time I’ve come to savour, I drew a couple of sketches of a plant that had captured my imagination. The plant in question was a supermarket kalanchoe. A number of these cheery plants adorn my kitchen window sill, although I’ll admit to having little success in keeping them happy after their colourful flowers have faded. One defied the odds and keep growing, long after the flowers had gone. I take little credit in the fact it kept growing, that was entirely the plants doing; a stubborn determinant on it’s part to survive my over watering. I’m glad it did grown because the way it grew and the shapes it created really intrigued me.
It’s all about perspective
Hot on the heals of the Pots & Plates collection, the in-between kalanchoe sketches proved there was merit in exploring the single plant and pot story further. This time the desire was to more fully emphasis a pseudo-naive perspective. Where the Pots & Plates suggested a sense of looking down and into the mouth of the pot, I now wanted to bring the pot and foliage front and centre. As if the composition was leaning flat against the foreground.
Bullseye
A major challenge with this perspective decision was the creation of a bullseye, just south of centre, in all the paintings. A bullseye in a painting is a point from which it can be hard to move the eye away from. For this reason bullseyes are generally discouraged in compositions, unless of course it’s a carefully considered part of the painting and the artist knows what they’re doing.
In my case I wanted to create a circular focal point form which the rest of the shapes would grow from, in much the same way as I view the plant and pot in it’s kitchen window sill position. At the kitchen sink I look down onto the pot and it’s thick cylindrical walls make such a pleasing outline. I’ll let you be the judge of the compositions bullseye success.
Repeating patterns
An important feature of the collection is the use of pattern. As a vehicle to overcome the bullseye and encourage movement around the paintings, repeating patterns were introduced. Several patterns fill both the positive and negative shapes in the paintings. They give texture to the branches and create a continuous plain of movement behind the foreground objects. The patterns also represent a coming together of new skills and ideas from this years learning journey into surface pattern design. For me it’s important to implement new ways of working and embrace the changes and developments they bring to my skills set.
Blueberries
The two larger paintings in the collection feature a hand drawn repeating blueberry pattern. It’s the first trailing floral design that I’ve created and is embedded into the paintings using a transfer technique involving digital prints and acrylic mediums. So what do kalanchoes and blueberries have in common I hear you ask?
It goes a little something like this… the journey up and down my garden, from kitchen to studio, involves views of both types of plant. Through the kalanchoes in my kitchen I see a potted blueberry bush and from my studio I see the colourful kalanchoe blooms beyond the blueberry pot. The abstract relationship between these two plants and my daily interaction with them piqued my interest. So often inspiration is found hiding in plain sight.
Favourite colours
The collections colours took some curious twists and turns. Setting out to achieve a palette of Miami Beach style pastels, a destination reflective of the plants colourful blooms and a location it might feel more at home growing in, proved easier said than done. The mood of this years lengthy British winter decided to get in the way. Learning to pay attention to how and why I make artistic decisions I’ve come to realise that outside forces, such as seasonal changes, play an increasingly noticeable part in my decision making.
Pastels colours are among my favourites. They are the colours that suit my completion, the colours I seek out and that bring me joy. They are however colours that are at odds with cooler times of the year, and so the colours of some of my paintings changed to a deeper palette. Pattern Pending and Anaglypta are reflective of these seasonal observations. As the year warmed up and the light became brighter so did the rest of the collection.
Seasonal change and personal growth
Kalanchoes is a collection of semi representational still life paintings. They celebrate the leggy fronds and waxy scalloped leaves of a favourite kitchen plant and hand made pot (inspired by the work of ceramicist Francesca Kaye, and made in the studio of friend and ceramicist Frances Mace). At the heart of the collection is a desire to explore relationships between rich layers of paint (applied using a number of controlled techniques) a myriad of hand drawn patterns and carefully considered colours. The paintings traverse seasonal changes and explore personal growth. They are possibly the most inward reaching paintings I’ve created to date. Their creation spans nine months of the year, a significant number in the development of small things that grown to become a fully formed life force.
It is also with a great scenes of personal satisfaction and pride that I’m able to display the Kalanchoes collection along side the work of my mum, Susan Mackie, in our joint Family Ties exhibition at Emerald Frames and Gallery.
Would you like to see the whole collection?
Hop over to my portfolio page and enjoy a closer look. While you are there please sign up to my BRIGHT Newsletter and be the first to know about new collections, events and creative inspiration.