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Waiting List Flower Portraits Please contact me for price enquiries and to put your name on the waiting list for
the rare and highly sought after flower portraits. The first collector on the list will be
offered the latest painting.
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If no interest is shown, it will be shown to the next collector
on the list, and so on. Delivery may take up to 6 months, depending on my overall work
schedule.
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Critique: Fredric Bender 2005
What I like …. is that EVERYTHING IS ALIVE, even the background! The purple manages to
swirl in “Portrait of Three Tulips”. There's this vitality, this movement, curves, color, contrast,
unbounded, going off the frame - kind of wild and untamed, can't be captured, primitive,
THE FORCE OF LIFE…there's this overlapping of flowers and branches,
creating a fore- and background that adds yet another dimension and complexity.
The eye has no choice but to follow the drooping flower in the foreground across the canvas
to its multi-color bloom and yet the two other flowers, which you so boldly allow to go off
frame after you follow their branches up to their buds,
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help to keep the balance. It seems
so audacious and spontaneous. And just really, really good! I mean, if I were to allow
myself to get carried away, I could even imagine a relationship between all three flowers
based on their spacing and how their branches intertwine. There's almost like a dance going
on and the drooping flower almost emotes; it's already bloomed and in decline, while the two
others are definitely "together" just coming into their prime, tall and full of strength.
Yet, that drooping flower is so beautiful and majestic and it's emotive quality even makes
the purple background swirl right behind and around it!
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Excerpt from the catalogue: Sally Arnold 1995-2005 On a sunny afternoon while my children played in the Botanical Gardens in Rome,
I sketched lotus pods rising up out of a pond. They fascinated me with their sculptural
qualities and interesting system of submerged seeds in deep cavities. The first flower
painting “Portrait of a Lotus Seed Pod” was begun in the Eternal City, and completed
in Luxembourg after moving |
north in 1996. The drops of rain are a reference to my childhood
in a semi-arid area in South Africa, the Karoo. Rain being so rare, we would run outdoors
to drink it as it fell. The drops later mutated to leopard spots and other patterns.
A series of nineteen portraits developed from this seminal piece.
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Sources used for these paintings were some drawings from nature but mainly photographs.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower studies, Karl Blossfeldt’s manipulated “Urformen der Kunst”
as well as specialized handbooks on plant varieties, such as lilies, accompanied my research.
I also photographed plants in my own garden in Luxembourg, one of which I used for example
for the “Poppy Seed Pod”. Another quality in the painting process which interests me greatly is the aspect
of light shining through layers of oil painting. To this end, I experimented with
“washes” of oil and added only organic thinning agents to the paint.
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Layers of colour
over one another also created depth. For the large “Portrait of a Lily” 2004 and all
subsequent flower portraits, I painted a plain matt acrylic background, then oil to
give the impression of a luminous blossom. Since having seen the first colour
videogames in the Eighties, I have been fascinated by the quality of LCD displays,
and consciously created these paintings as an answer to the power and vibrancy of
digitally created imagery.
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