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.

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.

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,

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!

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.

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.

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.